If you’re contemplating renovating your investment property to rent out as an airbnb, you don’t want to miss this luxury renovation we recently completed on the Gold Coast. Our client, Shelly has impeccable taste and chose quality, up-market products to suit a more sophisticated target market. Her guests will be staying in a 3-bedroom immaculately renovated apartment that’s right on the beach, facing the ocean… and when you open the balcony doors—it is a holiday-makers dream. 

So What Flooring Considerations Do You Need to Make When Renovating Your Airbnb?

Acoustic Considerations from Body Corporate

When updating flooring from carpet to hard flooring in an apartment, you will need to adhere to Body Corporate by-laws which specify the acoustic requirements of your new flooring (you will even need to have your new floors acoustically tested). These by-laws can actually ‘trump’ industry standards, so it’s important to have them on-hand before visiting our Gold Coast flooring showroom.

Timber-Flooring-Acoustic-Testing

Direct-stuck engineered timber, oak or hickory flooring is a good solution for apartment renovations as they have great acoustic ratings and generally reduce noise transfer between floors. Even if not required, we recommend having your flooring acoustically tested prior to installation. This removes the worry of potentially having to remove your new floors post-installation should your floors fail the test. For this project we even installed a rubber underlay—just in case!

Flooring Wear and Tear

Wear and tear is expected with any investment property, whether it’s a full-time rental or airbnb. While you may want to consider a known hardwearing product like vinyl flooring, it doesn’t quite give you the same finish and appeal as luxury Engineered Oak flooring. In this renovation, Shelly chose Australian Select Timbers range, Noble, Engineered Oak and ran it through the entrance, hallway, dining, kitchen and living room. 

There are plenty of reasons why you should consider Engineered Oak Flooring in your investment property or Airbnb including:

  • Engineered oak flooring looks just like a real thing, but is more affordable and durable.
  • Engineered oak flooring is durable and strong, outlasting cheaper timber-look alternatives.
  • Well-installed and well-maintained oak flooring can increase the value of your property.
  • You can re-sand and refinish engineered oak flooring several times in its lifetime.
  • Engineered oak flooring adds beautiful aesthetics to your home and comes in a variety of types and finishes.

Updating Your Flooring Around Your Kitchen Installers

At One Source Flooring, we’re more than happy to work with your kitchen installers to ensure that your new airbnb flooring is installed at the right time. If you’re installing a floating floor, it may seem to make sense to put your flooring in first, but this isn’t the case. While every project is different, in most cases you need to install your kitchen carcass first and the rest post-flooring. This takes flooring movement/expansion into consideration and can also save you money as you’re not having to pay for flooring that you wouldn’t even see under your cabinets.

Onesourceflooring Engineeredoak Kitchen3

Creating Luxury And A Point of Difference

Airbnbs aren’t supposed to be like any usual hotel suite. They can have quality finishes to help further direct your apartments’ appeal to your targeted demographic. In the bedrooms of this airbnb, our client chose to plush, soft, sophisticated wool carpet (Everest by Victoria Carpets). Not only does this help with the acoustic levels we covered earlier, but it also adds a touch of luxury. Wool carpet comes with the benefit of being naturally stain resistant, it’s easy to clean and is perfect for guests with allergies as it’s naturally hypoallergenic (see some other benefits below). We just love the 3rd bedroom being used as a yoga retreat with the option to move one of the single beds to this room instead.

  • Wool carpet is resilient and wears slower than carpets made from fibres like polypropylene.
  • Wool carpet is hypoallergenic and helps absorb common airborne contaminants.
  • Wool carpet is a natural insulator, keeping rooms cool in summer and warm in winter.
  • Wool carpet is sustainable and is produced from natural resources.

Transitioning Flooring from Halls to Bedrooms

For older apartments where the bedroom flooring heights may actually be higher than halls, it’s important to consider how this should be tackled. Rather than flooding the floors with leveller to bring all of the flooring up to the same height (this would be very costly!), we installed ramping using concrete levelling, a technique that when used with engineered flooring can be tricky for the inexperienced to accomplish.

As you can see here, this technique has also allowed us to not require any unsightly metal joins—it looks so much more polished! You also can’t even see the ramping (unless you look really closely), giving the apartment a seamless finish.

Onesourceflooring Entrancetransition

Book a Free Design Consultation

So what do you think of this airbnb flooring renovation? We hope you love it just as much as we do! We wanted to send a big thanks to Shelly for allowing us into her space to take photos and share our top airbnb renovation tips with you all.

If you’d love advice on how to best tackle your apartment flooring whether it be carpet, hybrid, vinyl, laminate or engineered flooring, book a one-on-one design consultation with our flooring experts below.

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