After years of paying expensive rent my SO and I are looking into buying our first home. The place we are looking at has carpets installed and we've already decided that carpets are a no-go. We have 3 dogs, two are in the 15 lb range and one is about 40 lbs.

We are buying the house as an investment and are looking to make improvements along the way. Does anyone have suggestions about flooring that will stand up to dog accidents and scratches but still make the house look valuable? Our current rental home has tile in the dog areas and it seems to be holding up really well for the occassional accident but it's just so ugly. But it is funny when the youngest dog ends up sliding down a freshly mopped floor. I love the appearance of hardwood floors but will dog nails damage them?

All suggestions would rock, unless they are snarky. :)

I plan on putting in travertine tile when I replace my kitchen floors this summer. It is beautiful and will hold up well.

Hard wood would be a definite no-no with dogs. Their nails will scratch it. The laminate flooring has a similar problem and isn't viewed as valuable. Ceramic tile definately increases the value of a home. Be careful though many people want carpet in the bedrooms. The travertine tile is the most expensive.

Ceramic tile is your best bet and you have a lot of choices in terms of tile color/size and grout color, so hopefully you can find somethign you like. Nowadays sets of tiles are sold that allow you to create borders and patterns to give a classier look. I have also seen 20X20 tile used in one home and it looked very nice.

In bedrooms, where carpet is expected, maybe look at dark-colored berber carpeting. The pile on berbers are, at least from my experince, quite durable. They can sometimes be more difficult to clean than regular carpeting but if you go with a tan or darker color it should be OK ;)

Laminate and vinyl composite tile are cheap and easy to DIY but are not durable. We have VCT in the kitchen of our rental home and it looks absolutely TERRIBLE and the flooring is only 5 yrs old. Covered in scratches, black skid marks, dents and it is discolored to a yellow hue.

We may keep or reinstall carpet in the bedrooms. In our rental home now, we have carpets in the bedrooms and just keep the door closed or use doggy gates. The dogs are pretty good about not going into the rooms. Except for the 40 lb dog, Lady. We've had her for seven years and she has no intention on following rules that the smaller dogs have to follow. :)

Travertine looks beautiful but I'm afraid it may be a bit too high. Thank you for the advice about the hardwood floors and laminate. I've never had hardwood floors in a home but they look gorgeous on television. I don't mind sticking with tile, I love the ease of keeping it clean.

We just put hard wood floors down last weekend, due to my 2 pups having accidents on the carpet ( which was brand new we just bought our home in june) but i love the hard wood floors and i dont know what its called but the sealant that makes it shiny the top coat has a 10 year warrenty and we were told will not scratch easly at all- as in dogs and cats ect.
I have tile in my kitchen and my bathrooms are tile and my bedrooms are carpet.
I love tile and we were going to tile the hole house but decided on beautiful hard wood floors that are so nice they do bring up the value in your home so does tile.
(our neighbor is a appraiser)
Of coarse i have only had wood floors a week in this house but im pretty postive that my dogs wont ruin it. I had wood floors in the last rental before we bought this house and we had bentley from 7weeks old and we lived there for 7 months with him i think it was and he NEVER messed with the woodfloors and its so easy to clean up accidents. and your house dont smell like dogs or cats, as with carpet smells get trapped in the carpets.

My dogs are little dogs tho, bentley is 7 pounds and a over a year old and daisy is 11 pounds and going on 7 month old in a week or so . So i dont know if bigger dogs will make a differnce? I do think my kids put more wear and tare on flooring them dogs do..lol
Hope this helps

arpets in our house are now history! lol.
We have all tile.