Upstairs Guests and Heavy Shoes

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My floors just squeak. The good thing is I only have guest rooms on the second floor - I am the only one who hears the squeaks.
 
High heels and cowboy boots were killer noise makers! Even with area rugs, every time those shoes hit the hardwood floor, I cringed.
 
We solved it with wall to wall carpet. The carpet installer tried to talk us out of it because we have some really pretty antique wood floors. But we love our carpet!
 
We solved it with wall to wall carpet. The carpet installer tried to talk us out of it because we have some really pretty antique wood floors. But we love our carpet!
Everybody loves the wood floors, but you have to be practical. Carpet is about the only way to silence the overhead footsteps for the people on the floor beneath. It a one-family home, it's not a problem, but in a hotel or B & B, it only makes sense to do it. I guess it's why most hotel rooms in the USA have carpet.
 
Everybody loves the wood floors, but you have to be practical. Carpet is about the only way to silence the overhead footsteps for the people on the floor beneath. It a one-family home, it's not a problem, but in a hotel or B & B, it only makes sense to do it. I guess it's why most hotel rooms in the USA have carpet.
We ripped up the carpet because it was filthy. There was a variety of wood types on the floor. Lots of paint splatter, quite a bit of damage. Had it been our personal space, we would have worked on the wood. But, given what you’ve said about needing to think about other people, we put new carpet and thick pads down. On the first floor, all wood with area rugs to deaden the sounds in the hallways.

Interesting ‘feature’ we found when we moved the furniture in the first floor rooms was the PO’s only refinished the floors around the area rugs. There were streaks where the refinishing product had oozed under the rug.

I know that older homes often had ‘good’ wood like oak around the edges and ‘poor’ wood like pine in the center because they knew they were putting down area rugs and it was cheaper. But to just slap some finishing product down and not bother to move the furniture was really annoying.
 
Our tradeoff is wood floors, but with rugs in key areas to try and muffle most of the sounds. We only use them on upstairs rooms, not on first-floor ones.
 
I know that older homes often had ‘good’ wood like oak around the edges and ‘poor’ wood like pine in the center because they knew they were putting down area rugs and it was cheaper. But to just slap some finishing product down and not bother to move the furniture was really annoying.
Just for a laugh, many years ago as a teenager our oldest son helped a cute girl in the neighborhood paint her bedroom, came home talking about how on prior paint jobs they just painted the wall around the furniture, never forget that one.
 
Us too. The P.O. painted the floor around the bed. We found it when we moved the bed. Seriously? And she painted around a large mirror in the hallway, then took the mirror when she moved out leaving a big unpainted rectangle on the main hallway wall.
 
I’ve been known to not strip the wallpaper behind the fridge. So that means I also didn’t paint back there. We were going to, just for fun, strip the wallpaper in the guest rooms without removing the full length mirrors. Then paint, leaving the wallpaper as a reminder what things used to be. Of course, the only people who would know are the ones redoing the rooms years hence.

After we removed all of our stuff from the tops of the cabinets I realized Gomez did not remove those things when he painted the ceiling. It looks like weird shadows if you don’t know…
 
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