best flooring for a basement playroom

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have Berber in part of our finished basement playroom and Marmoleum in the hallway leading to the back door. I would never put carpet near any door leading outdoors.

Marmoleum is environmentally-friendly and comes in gorgeous colors.

We have Berber carpet with a good thick pad underneath throughout our basement, and we keep a large scrap of the same carpet along with a plastic mat by the door, and we take off our shoes when we come in. I should note that we do have a really great French drain/sump pump system that have kept our basement bone dry even through a hurricane, a derecho, and a "superstorm." If we had any reason to expect problems with wetness, I would do tile floor and keep it soft with rubber or carpet tiles that can be easily pulled up and dried. THere's nothign worse than the smell of a carpet that has been wet.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What is the name of the Home Depot version of Flor tiles called? A major appeal of Flor is no need for adhesive (just those adhesive dots with the adhesive face up) and HD seems to need adhesive that you spread all over the floor.

I'm going to be the Flor dissenter here and say that I HATED them, largely for this reason. The little "dots' you use to hold the tiles together were virtually useless. You can get new ones but even then you are constantly fiddling with them and replacing them. I suppose I might be willing to try Flor again if I were going to do them wall-to-wall, in the hopes that the walls would keep the tiles together, but I would not do them as an area rug,a nd definitely not in a medium or high traffic area. Also, they are quite thin, definitely not cushy enough to turn a tile or cement floor into a comfy play area for a small child unless you put a very thick mat underneath.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What is the name of the Home Depot version of Flor tiles called? A major appeal of Flor is no need for adhesive (just those adhesive dots with the adhesive face up) and HD seems to need adhesive that you spread all over the floor.

Simply Seamless? The entire back is adhesive...you don't use additional adhesive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We got wall-to-wall carpet from home depot, knowing we may need to replace it any time due to water issues and being a walk-out basement, but it is cold down there and I vastly prefer it to the linoleum we had before. I love it. 7 years later and we've had one coffee spill in the corner but it's not that noticeable. I just hate sitting on tile floors, but we play board games on ours all the time.

If your planning on using it for lots of kids' painting or artwork though, maybe not

PP here (with berber throughout basement). This is the one thing I don't like about what we've got. I wish I had an area of the baseement where we could do messy projects without giving it a second thought. I have a good-sized section of floor adjacent to the laundry room covered with those rubber alphabet tiles and that helps, but they always end up getting pulled up and played with, and I don't know that they would protect the carpet from a big spill.