Upstairs Flooring with Allergies

[zukeypur]

DH had allergy testing last week and found out that he is horribly allergic to dust mites, along with many grasses, live oaks, cats, dogs (NOOOOO!!!!), and several other things. I suspected he was allergic to something that was inside the house, as he seems to have a tough time on days when he is working upstairs in the office all day. We removed the carpet downstairs and replaced with engineered hardwoods when we moved in, but we left carpet on the stairs and upstairs. I'm guessing that despite our regular vacuuming, there is a dust mite issue in the carpet. It was put in right before we bought the house 8 years ago. I'm wondering if we should consider replacing the carpet with new carpet and step up our cleaning game, or if we should consider another flooring option. We have both engineered hardwoods and LVP downstairs (long story....unexplained water situation in the bedroom; didn't want to replace with hardwoods if we didn't know what was causing the leak and if it would return, so we went with a similar looking LVP which I hate), so I don't know if it would be better to match the engineered hardwood or LVP. To be honest, I don't really love either. The hardwood is too dark and a PITA to keep clean for more than 5 seconds, and the LVP feels like plastic. To complicate things, we have a brady bunch stair case with space between the stairs, so I'm not sure what would be easiest to cover the stairs with.

Any advice or experience?

[Kindra178]

DH had allergy testing last week and found out that he is horribly allergic to dust mites, along with many grasses, live oaks, cats, dogs (NOOOOO!!!!), and several other things. I suspected he was allergic to something that was inside the house, as he seems to have a tough time on days when he is working upstairs in the office all day. We removed the carpet downstairs and replaced with engineered hardwoods when we moved in, but we left carpet on the stairs and upstairs. I'm guessing that despite our regular vacuuming, there is a dust mite issue in the carpet. It was put in right before we bought the house 8 years ago. I'm wondering if we should consider replacing the carpet with new carpet and step up our cleaning game, or if we should consider another flooring option. We have both engineered hardwoods and LVP downstairs (long story....unexplained water situation in the bedroom; didn't want to replace with hardwoods if we didn't know what was causing the leak and if it would return, so we went with a similar looking LVP which I hate), so I don't know if it would be better to match the engineered hardwood or LVP. To be honest, I don't really love either. The hardwood is too dark and a PITA to keep clean for more than 5 seconds, and the LVP feels like plastic. To complicate things, we have a brady bunch stair case with space between the stairs, so I'm not sure what would be easiest to cover the stairs with.

Any advice or experience?

Bare is always better than carpet and rugs. We don't use rugs, carpet or curtains in any bedroom. Running an air purifier in your bedroom also helps with allergies. In your case, I would get a second air purifier for his office as well. Pollen just gets in! We use Austin Air or Blue Air. Make sure the ones you use aren't emitting ozone. There's a great list floating around these boards, posted by Annie. In my experience, room purifiers work better than a large one that's supposed to cover an entire floor.

Change the filters on your furnace once a month. Go with Merv 11 or higher (much higher than 11 reduces output).

Vacuum once a week. Use air conditioning more and don't open the windows. Allegra and Nasonex are great.

[twowhat?]

Non-carpet is always 100% going to be better with allergies and agree with an air purifier in his office where he is spending the most time.

Re: engineered hardwood: we have a lighter color engineered hardwood and find the lighter color 150 times easier to keep clean than the dark brazilian cherry that we had before!!! I HIGHLY recommend a lighter color, especially one with some visual texture to it like wirebrushing or other rustic distressing (I'm not talking SUPER rustic but just enough that scratches look right at home). Our dark hardwoods seemed instantly covered with dust, dirt, specks, dog hair. Our lighter hardwoods look clean even when they're not.

You could consider doing just his office (+ air purifier) if he doesn't spend a ton of time in the other upstairs rooms. You can consider any hard flooring material (tile, engineered hardwood, LVP, etc).

Stairs - you could rip out carpet and replace the treads with hardwood planks? The trick will be to make it blend well with your downstairs flooring and your upstairs flooring. In order to do that in our house, we had our staircase refinished with black stained treads, and white risers (you won't have risers though). And on the black wood treads, we have carpet treads (for safety, not allergies) that look like a runner - they were custom made with a bullnose edge that wraps around the front lip of each step and they look great. My guess is carpet on your stairs won't make a huge difference in the allergies unless he spends a lot of time sitting on the steps.

[urquie]

Stairs - you could rip out carpet and replace the treads with hardwood planks? The trick will be to make it blend well with your downstairs flooring and your upstairs flooring. In order to do that in our house, we had our staircase refinished with black stained treads, and white risers (you won't have risers though). And on the black wood treads, we have carpet treads (for safety, not allergies) that look like a runner - they were custom made with a bullnose edge that wraps around the front lip of each step and they look great. My guess is carpet on your stairs won't make a huge difference in the allergies unless he spends a lot of time sitting on the steps.

Any chance you could post a photo of your carpet treads? They sound really intriguing. :-) Also your custom source. :-)

Sounds like a great solution for our house… and the only thing prevent us from getting rid of carpet upstairs. Our large dog couldn’t do hard surface stairs without biting it!

[DualvansMommy]

Bare is always better than carpet and rugs. We don't use rugs, carpet or curtains in any bedroom. Running an air purifier in your bedroom also helps with allergies. In your case, I would get a second air purifier for his office as well. Pollen just gets in! We use Austin Air or Blue Air. Make sure the ones you use aren't emitting ozone. There's a great list floating around these boards, posted by Annie. In my experience, room purifiers work better than a large one that's supposed to cover an entire floor.

Change the filters on your furnace once a month. Go with Merv 11 or higher (much higher than 11 reduces output).

Vacuum once a week. Use air conditioning more and don't open the windows. Allegra and Nasonex are great.

This. One of our boys is allergic to specific dog hair, pollen while other kiddo is severely allergic to same as your son, OP. Particularly dust mites.

What worked for us is taking same approach to kindra. All hardwood floors upstairs, NO rugs. We put room air purfierer in each kiddo bedroom, allergen proof mattress pad and allergen pillow cases.

Because we have a dog, we step up on vaccuming. We do it twice a week and keep a cordless vacuum upstairs and bigger cordless downstairs since we do have rugs some downstair rooms.

All of above helps. We change the filter religiously monthly. as noticed ours flare up big time, if it isn’t changed beyond week 5.


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[twowhat?]

Any chance you could post a photo of your carpet treads? They sound really intriguing. :-) Also your custom source. :-)

Sounds like a great solution for our house… and the only thing prevent us from getting rid of carpet upstairs. Our large dog couldn’t do hard surface stairs without biting it!

Yes, we ended up doing it for the dog too, there was no way he could safely go up and down the stairs! The source we used is Oak Valley Designs: https://www.oakvalleydesigns.com/ HOWEVER BIG FAT DISCLAIMER: I had good luck with them and they did a lovely job on our stair treads and were very responsive via email, even working with me to correct a measurement mistake. However, more recent reviews on Google and FB are less than favorable. I know they got slammed hard by COVID, business-wise. I believe I was lucky to get my order in earlier on in the pandemic, before they started having problems. If you decide to try them, I would definitely first make sure you can get a hold of them by phone and get their absolute assurance that your project will be done right! I love to support small businesses when I can but for this one I would want to know that they've been able to dig themselves out of the pandemic-related business issues.

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/60/db/6e/6...f97b368596.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/d0/1e/67/d...f6ba688444.jpg

[AnnieW625]

Here is the most recent list of air purifiers approved for sale in California that don’t emit ozone. California is the gold standard for air quality and the federal EPA often follows California’s rules for the federal rules even though the federal rules are the laws of the entire land.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/list-carb-cer...eaning-devices

We also recently purchased these filters from Nordic Pure on Amazon and are happy with them. The prior owner had IQ Air Filters by Swiss Air that were Merv 16, but were too expensive (4 filters were $388 or so, but supposedly lasted about a year….ours was pretty dirty so we had to replace it) and so far so good with the Nordic Pure. We will see how they do during fire season.

https://nordicpure.com/pleated-air-filter/

Flooring wise could you do hardwood like tile? We have been very happy with Arizona Tile’s Aequa Castor tile (we have it in our two bathrooms in our current house, but also had it in our old bathroom and kitchen….we have now happily used it on three renovation jobs)

https://www.arizonatile.com/en/galle...-ceramic/aequa


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[zukeypur]

Thank you all for your feedback. We ended up ordering two of these yesterday, one for upstairs in the office and one for downstairs, probably in the bedroom. They might be overkill for one room, but they were the cheapest option (thanks amazon!) with the best reviews on Consumer Reports. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...KIKX0DER&psc=1

We also ordered another Roomba so that we have one running upstairs and one downstairs every day. I am very diligent about using it downstairs every day, as well as the Miele with Hepa filter weekly on the hardwoods/tile/LVP and two large area rugs downstairs. The kids are responsible for vacuuming upstairs, which is probably where some of the problem lies.

I really like the idea of the stair treads on the stairs and hard flooring upstairs. It might be a little tricky because the bottom three stairs are traditional stairs, and the third has a bit of a landing because the staircase turns there.

As for the flooring upstairs, I am really not sure what to go with. I have never really liked the wood look tile, but the more I think about it, the more I think that's what we should have just done throughout the whole house. However, we are most definitely not in a position to replace the flooring in the whole house right now. We just did the LVP in the master bedroom earlier this year, and DH would kill me if I wanted to rip it out 6 months after we put it in. It's a decent match to the hardwoods in the living room/dining room, but not a direct match of course. It's floated and not glued down, so it has a hollow sound that I hate. It's much easier to keep clean than the hardwoods though, so for that reason I would put it over the hardwoods for upstairs. I was actually leaning towards putting it in the whole house eventually, but I don't really like how it feels or sounds. Funny, because I really like it in other houses. Tile upstairs would be great (I really like the Aequa Castor), but I'm not sure how we would do the stairs. I think those would be easier to cover with the LVP.

[zukeypur]

Adding pictures of current flooring; engineered hardwoods and new LVP that was the closest match to the hardwoods.
IMG_4259.jpg

[twowhat?]

Adding pictures of current flooring; engineered hardwoods and new LVP that was the closest match to the hardwoods.
IMG_4259.jpg

Wow, that's a great match! And agree that tone of dark is a PITA to keep looking clean, it's similar in darkness to what we had previously and had to replace due to a leak. Since you hate the plastic-y feel in the bedroom, you could place a rug under the bed (be sure rug is large enough so that it doesn't look too small...lots of info online from designers about how to select the right rug size). A ruggable won't hold on to dust like traditional carpet and may add just enough softness and look nice enough that you forget about the plastic under your feet.

Our stairs have a turn to them as well and our black treads (they are solid hardwood, stained black) work SO well to tie upstairs and downstairs flooring together without matching anything. We have black treads and white risers and black-and-white go great with our downstairs flooring as well as our upstairs beige-y carpet. That way you don't need to match your downstairs flooring, treads, OR upstairs flooring and you can simply pick what flooring works best for you upstairs. You can add a carpet tread over your stairs later if you desire and that doesn't have to match, it can have a pattern like many stair runners do. Alternative you could have a patterned carpet wrapped over your existing "floating" treads, and have that carpet transition to a traditional runner at your bottom steps. We allllmost went with a navy carpet tread - this one: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/eb/7e/4d/e...b2c1edcbb7.jpg, as it looked SO cool with our floors and our staircase but decided to play it safe with a less bold pattern. But I still have dreams of ordering another set of carpet treads in that navy pattern and putting it up for the holidays!