The Crippling Blizzard of '16

[OakLeaf]

As far as your floor, I wonder whether there is a natural equivalent of a padded laminate. That would probably insulate from noise fairly well.

We have cork flooring in our downstairs and love, love, love it.

It's a superb insulator for both sound and temperature. As far as humidity, it behaves more like hardwood (the space was carpeted when we moved in, and when we tore the carpet out and replaced it with the cork, the humidity dropped by 10 percentage points without making any other changes!). It's just beautiful, and comes in a variety of colors and patterns, both natural and dyed. It hides dings and doesn't stain. Ours is a floating floor, so it isn't suitable for wet spaces, but sealed cork is available. It wasn't cheap, but it's comparable to hardwood, less expensive than some woods.

Oh, and it's super durable. That was a concern of ours, and one of the things that really sold us on it was that the flooring display store had cork in their highest traffic areas. Where we have ours doesn't get a lot of traffic, but it's been there I think seven or eight years and looks new. My hairstylist has cork floor in her salon, and that DOES get a lot of traffic, including being swept after every haircut, and after several years it hardly shows any wear at all.

My favorite story about our cork flooring - soon after we installed it, we were replacing our picture tube TV and set it on a window bench. It was a smaller TV, but being a picture tube TV, still at least 50#. When the cushion compressed, the TV fell about a foot and a half onto the floor, right onto a corner of its cabinet. You have to look hard to see the ding in the floor, even though it's maybe 2" in diameter. If we tell the story to someone who doesn't know where the hole is, we have to show them where it is, they can't find it. Best part? The TV still worked after it fell onto the cork-cushioned floor.