Hanging house in the Southwest Palatinate - Our House Construction 2.0

Do you use these XeloTech wheels directly on the parquet?
They really look good and are also rated extremely well.

Yes, so far directly without any underlay.
At least after one year of daily use for 1-3 hours, no problems.

PS: As I said, just do a test with your parquet and leave any liquids on it for several hours/days and then evaluate whether your fear is justified or not. Throw objects or hit it with a hammer to get a better impression :)

and then do the comparison on a tile of your choice or a piece of "Designboden" = vinyl. You will see, wood handles that much more comfortably ;-)

But we are currently "selling" you a product for which you have probably already decided - right?

But we are "selling" you a product you have probably already decided on - right?

Good question. It also depends a bit on the price. I’m not exactly sure where my limit is, but I know I don’t want to shell out thousands of euros extra for flooring. Our builder said he last installed parquet a few months ago in a whole house, and the additional cost for the builders was about €4 / m². So very manageable. It’s not just about the material price. He says he calculates the whole house as tiled, and laying parquet or vinyl is less laborious/expensive, so he would offset what he saves on installation against our extra cost. However, the interior construction guy says he can’t give the material price off the cuff right now, the only thing he can say is that it has become more expensive.

So we’ll have to see what comes of it / where we end up. Intuitively, I would really like to have the floor.

How do you people with parquet do the re-oiling? We were told that you have to do it every few years when the floor gets dull. Do you move all the furniture for that, or do you work around the furniture? We have such a set of extremely heavy wooden furniture, which I’m a bit dreading.

So we have parquet almost everywhere; relatively high-quality oak parquet, oiled.

1. Use high-quality oil. There are huge differences. The oil we have (our house builder put it on the parquet for us; we only found out afterward that it is really great) is expensive but truly very high-quality. We recommended it to our carpenter, who made our kitchen and other built-ins, and he was totally amazed and has only been using it since then. Unfortunately, I’m sitting in the office today and can’t check the name directly. But it’s a two-component oil, and a good parquet installer usually also has a little machine to apply the oil. It looks like one of those old-fashioned polishing machines. I think it was the Rubio MonoCoat Oil Plus 2C Mix in natural/colorless. We have now been living in the house for over 3 years, and I wouldn’t know why I should re-oil...
2. I’m not a lightweight either and have parquet in my office combined with the Markus office chair from Ikea. I basically work from home every day (except today...), and after more than two years, I still can’t see any signs of wear on the parquet. In the basement, we have our second office with spruce flooring, and there’s a protective mat on it.
3. We also have parquet in the kitchen and would always do it like that again. Sure, you can see the occasional spot, but overall oak is very stain-friendly. The tannic acid contained in oak causes most stains to naturally fade after a while (even cat poop stains – we tested that...). When my husband once spilled a bottle of olive oil and the contents spread over the kitchen floor, you couldn’t see it after a few days. At that spot, the wood was simply oiled again *ahem*. Overall, we can live with a few signs of everyday life. In return, we have a floor that is simply cozy.
4. Cleaning: with parquet, less is more. We have a robot vacuum that runs through the ground floor every other day. We mop every few months, and that’s enough! Maybe people do it more often if they have small children, but it’s not dirty with us. For “wet cleaning” we have a Bissell, use VERY little cleaner with it, and it works very well.

Tiles: I would never use dark tiles in the entrance area; you can see every smudge on them. We actually like slate and originally wanted slate slabs, but after realizing how sensitive they are, decided on tiles with the look instead. We now have them on the bathroom floor. We like them, but I would never ever do that in the entrance area; you will clean yourself to death. We now have concrete-colored/beige tiles there. Sounds boring but it’s a neutral AND above all easy-to-clean tile. And that would be decisive for me for the entrance area, no matter what style it ends up being. Especially with almost two small children!

Not too many different floor coverings. We have light tiles in the entrance area and guest WC downstairs, otherwise oak parquet, and in the upstairs bathroom the dark tiles. In the basement, somewhat cheaper brushed spruce parquet. Also nice, we were just too stingy for oak there. Would do it the same way again. By the way, our parquet is not glued despite underfloor heating.

Overall, I would stay as neutral as possible with the floors and not create a style with them. Then in the future, when tastes change, you always have the option to furnish differently without having a floor that absolutely doesn’t fit. That was the motto for us overall for things that are fixed and thus stay longer: neutral, not dictating a style. This applies to floors, bathroom tiles, and windows.

So we have parquet almost everywhere....

Thank you very much, very good post and lots of helpful information. We also plan (if the price works out) to use parquet almost throughout the whole house, including the hallways. The utility rooms will get a natural stone look tile 60x60, the bathrooms an Oak Park Chalete from Villeroy & Boch, and that’s it. For the entrance area, we’re still considering the decorative tile. But it’s not purely dark and up close it has a brushed look, it’s a bit vintage style and probably you won’t see every crumb on it because it has many color gradients and grayish washes. I will take your parquet care tips to heart. Especially regarding mopping, I’ve already heard several times that it doesn’t need to be done that often. I think most of the time you just have to spot-clean something (ideally immediately), then nothing should happen. The classic “floors get mopped on Saturdays” is probably hardly done anymore nowadays, I guess. Better a decent vacuum that runs regularly, as you already say. In general we vacuum often and as needed, mop less. We usually don’t walk around the house with street shoes either, so that should be fine (?).

We will also have parquet (oak) almost everywhere, but laid floating. Tiles will only be used in the bathrooms and the entrance hallway. There I simply wanted tiles because of the expected dirt. Unfortunately, Travertine was rejected :-( but I now have a tile with a stone look (Silver grain in Beige) from Italgraniti and for the upper bathroom on two walls rhombus in white from Equipe. Otherwise, if we tile the wall at all, we will use the floor tile. I just didn't like any wall tiles otherwise. I also had a really hard time with the tiles. I almost didn't like anything.