IMO carpet nowhere rugs are great wall to wall carpet not. Waht are the stairs?

main floor is all hardwoord and stairs are carpet.

why carpet on the stairs?

Carpet seems just the safer option to us, with small kids with any unexpected falls and easier on the foot.

I keep the same carpet in the bedrooms and choose one that will work with the hardwood in bonus room. Go with a nylon or something that will withstand any accidents...stuff happens.

Do a runner on the stairs.

We have hardwood on main, carpet stairs, carpet all upstairs. It is far less slippery than hardwood on stairs and works well for us and our family. I prefer carpet in bedrooms. I know lots of people don’t or use rugs but it works for is great.

If any of the family has allergies, you should not have carpet.

Have you considered doing a runner on the stairs instead of carpet for the whole stairs?

It is far less slippery than hardwood on stairs

Agreed if wearing shoes but if wearing just socks or fabric slippers, it's much more slippery than bare wood.

With small kids, I would carpet the whole upstairs with something easy care and not expensive. Have a vacuum cleaner up there and you can zip around without too much hassle. What are on the stairs now? You can get inexpensive treads for wood stairs. I would not waste hardwood in a bonus room that will likely only be seen by children. Put the nice stuff in the adult spaces and enjoy your kids.

Would not put carpet in bonus

Would! Sorry. I would put carpet in bonus. Not wood

I think a runner on the stairs then hardwood everywhere else to match the main floor if this is your forever home you are building then do what you want but I would never buy a home with wall to wall carpet too many yucky things are in there .

I don't often agree with Patricia but in this case I do.

What is your final recommendation folks ? we are seeing few support for carpet upper floor and few for hardwood throughout the home. pls help us make a decision, thanks in advance.

Michael there are tons of comments in this thread. A lot of this comes down to what works for your family so only you know that.

I would always go with hardwood. You can put large area rugs over hardwood and you can put a runner down the stairs.

Well Michael, think about the difference in price with carpet and hardwood, and compounding internet in a college fund or retirement account.

Compounding INTEREST!!! The internet is confounding.

I love hardwood floors, and have them in much of the public spaces in our home, but I also enjoy carpet in bedrooms. The floor in my master bedroom needs updating in the next few years, and, while I would like hardwood floors and a beautiful area rug there, I will probably replace with carpet...I am not getting younger, and I worry about tripping on area rugs when I get up in the night...most likely not your concern with young kids, but I want to minimize falls as I age in place in my home. Also, I love getting down on on the carpeted floor to play with my toddler grandsons and young granddaughter (getting back up, not so much). As for the comments about "yucky things" in carpets...we don't eat in the bedrooms, and a very rare mess is cleaned up immediately, and vacuuming is done regularly, so I have no concerns there. Do what works for your family...there are pluses and minuses to all flooring choices.

When we bought our 1928 home, we assumed/ hoped there would be hardwoods under the upstairs carpet we ripped out, but we were wrong. We decided to do new carpet that was affordable & looked alright, mostly because we had small kids & were in a rush to get the house livable. But we also weren’t concerned with safety as much as the potential that our arts & crafts-loving kids would destroy newly-laid floors with their spills, paints, markers, hot glue guns, etc.

Fast forward ~10 years and our kids did very much wreck their carpets, but these are nearing the end of their useful life anyways, and we’ll feel much better replacing them with new hardwoods as our kids begin their adolescent/ teenage years. So if it were me, I would save some $$ by carpeting your entire upstairs now, but build wood stairs and put a runner on them. Reason for wood stairs: besides cohesiveness with your main level’s hardwoods, I would assume it’s harder & more expensive to retrofit your stairs to wood after they were originally built for carpet. And building codes for stairs nowadays make them pretty safe, and a runner will protect the wood from your kids. And if you go to sell or you are still there when your kids are older, you can always convert to hardwood at that time (vs having to refinish your floors and replace untold numbers of rugs during the kids’ more destructive years). Good luck!