First, need to make a difference between old hardwood floors and modern hardwood floors. Before the war that was what houses had - wall to wall carpeting didn't exist. Come the post-war period, houses were often built cheaply. Carpeting is a lot cheaper than old fashioned hard wood floors. Modern hardwood floors that you see in 50's ranch houses are probably not original to the house. And unless they were done recently, were probably rather low quality.
Where you usually see covered hardwood floors are in older pre-war homes, and I am betting a lot in the north east. Old homes were hard to heat, were usually uninsulated, and took a lot of upkep. As women started working instead of staying at home, the convenience of carpets too hold. Even if you didn't go wall to wall, you usually had rugs for a majorioty of the room.
I own an old house with old harwood floors, most of which are covered with rugs. Hardwood floor can look nice when kept up, but they scratch easily and look like crap even a year after a very expensive refinishing. They're cold. They are noisy. They are uncomfortable in bare feet, and a bitch to keep clean (you wouldn't thin, so but every bit of dirt shows up). Boards shrink with age and dry up, so they become noisy and have all these separations between the boards. It's like a slip'n'slide when you're wearing socks or you have furniture with hard legs, and usually you have to put something on the furniture legs so they don't scratch the floors. Ands iuf something does happen to the floor, you have to go through the whole refinishing thing again otherwise it doesn't match.
As for the linoleum thing, actually those were not covered wooden floors. Back then they did not have cheap plywood. Boards were all they had, so that WAS the subfloor. They used a wood that didn't look so well, but usually held up better. Then the tiles or linoleum went over that.
Where you usually see covered hardwood floors are in older pre-war homes, and I am betting a lot in the north east. Old homes were hard to heat, were usually uninsulated, and took a lot of upkep. As women started working instead of staying at home, the convenience of carpets too hold. Even if you didn't go wall to wall, you usually had rugs for a majorioty of the room.
I own an old house with old harwood floors, most of which are covered with rugs. Hardwood floor can look nice when kept up, but they scratch easily and look like crap even a year after a very expensive refinishing. They're cold. They are noisy. They are uncomfortable in bare feet, and a bitch to keep clean (you wouldn't thin, so but every bit of dirt shows up). Boards shrink with age and dry up, so they become noisy and have all these separations between the boards. It's like a slip'n'slide when you're wearing socks or you have furniture with hard legs, and usually you have to put something on the furniture legs so they don't scratch the floors. Ands iuf something does happen to the floor, you have to go through the whole refinishing thing again otherwise it doesn't match.
As for the linoleum thing, actually those were not covered wooden floors. Back then they did not have cheap plywood. Boards were all they had, so that WAS the subfloor. They used a wood that didn't look so well, but usually held up better. Then the tiles or linoleum went over that.
