Kristina Wolf's House of Design

Interior Design, Accessorizing, and DIY Tips

painted hardwood floors

How to Choose Different Room Flooring

It’s easy to spend more time choosing the color of your walls than different room flooring. But don’t ignore the importance of the right type of flooring.

Style, color, and material matter on your walls, but your floor is much more likely to be the victim of spills and stains. You want to choose flooring that works for your lifestyle and holds up in high traffic areas.

Choosing Colors

A room’s flooring can bring a room to life. When choosing different room flooring, the colors can trick your mind into thinking the space is larger or smaller than it is. It can also affect the room’s mood and how you feel when you spend time in it.

If you have a room that feels too large, try using darker colors and warmer tones. These colors can make the room seem smaller and cozier. Conversely, lighter tones can make a smaller space feel more open.

If you’re looking to impact a room’s mood rather than its size, start with colors here, too. Different colors make people feel different things.

Whites and beiges feel open and clean, while yellow feels bright and optimistic. Browns create a rustic atmosphere. Blues make people feel calm, and red brings energy into the room.

Matching and Coordinating

If you don’t know the difference between matching and coordinating, you may want to when considering your room’s flooring.

Matching your flooring means keeping the same type throughout your home. However, coordinating means using complimenting colours and styles that work with the aesthetic of each room. Don’t be afraid to experiment.

The Right Flooring for the Right Room

Choosing your flooring shouldn’t only be about color and style. You also need to think about the practicalities. Consider how you’ll use the room, and even who will use it.

Your children might love the idea of carpet in their bedrooms, but a hard surface that’s easy to clean may work better. The same goes for the kitchen where you have a high chance of spillage. A floor that you can easily mop rather than scrub functions better in these spaces.

If you’re stuck on whether to go for style or practicality, think about how much traffic each room sees. Rooms everyone in your home uses daily would benefit from harder surfaces like tile cork or slate. Consider carpet for rooms you use less often, so you don’t have to worry about cleaning them.

Transitioning Between Floors

When deciding on different room flooring, consider when and how to transition between the different types from room to room. You can ruin your home’s aesthetic with an awkward change in flooring.

You usually see floor transitions between different rooms. But you can get more creative than that. You can have one kind of floor surrounding another, like tiles surrounded by hardwood. Try switching your flooring around a corner, too.

If you’re choosing different room flooring for each room of your home, remember that the rooms may not be level with each other. In these cases, use a transition strip to even them out. This will make the transition look better, but also makes you less likely to trip.

The Good And Bad Of Painted Hardwood Floors

the-good-and-bad-of-painted-hardwood-floors

Hardwood floors are beautiful – until they’re not. In many older or long-neglected homes, hardwood floors, nicks, scratches, stains, and years of accumulated life can make them decidedly unattractive. Then there are those times when you want a specific look for a room – and your hardwood floors don’t contribute to the vision. In any case, you can paint hardwood floors any way you like, but you’ll want to be aware of a few pros and cons.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly About Painting Hardwood Floors

While well-maintained hardwood floors are beautiful, floors that beat up look more like a gymnasium floor than they do a traditional hardwood floor may not be so appealing. In these cases, you may be searching for more creative options.

Some of the benefits of repainting hardwood floors include:

  • Ease and Affordability. Refinishing a hardwood floor is a costly endeavor. The wood is stripped, sanded repaired, and then finished – and all of this requires significant time and labor. It also requires a specific skill set, and it’s a rare DIYer who can execute a professional-worthy wood floor refinishing project. Experience, skill, time, and labor costs money. Painting, however, is much easier, it’s much cheaper and can easily become a DIY process.
  • You can get creative. There are things you can achieve with a painted floor that cannot be achieved using carpet, tile, or area rugs. Hardwood floors painted white will yield that homey, country cottage look. You can use any colors or patterns you want to create unique designs and specific patterns. None of this is possible with a stained wood floor.
  • The ability to highlight a specific living space. Area rugs can do this as well, but then you lose the hardwood below. If you want to keep the hardwood surface but would like to create a defined outline of space, perhaps a colorful border around the master bedroom, fun or funky space in a child’s playroom or an artistic shape or pattern that matches your design vision – all of that can be done using paint.
  • It can be used as an accent. You aren’t limited to refinishing or painting; you can have both. Some people opt to refinish and stain the main living areas so the beautiful wood grains shine through. Then, paint can be used as a fun accent in smaller rooms in the house, like the bathroom or laundry room, for a little something different.
  • They’re easy to clean. If they are sealed well, painted hardwood floors are easy to clean. The paint seals the grooves in the wood, making them more impervious to dirt, grime, and stains. They can be cleaned with less ceremony and precision than stained and finished hardwood, and they are much easier to touch up if an area fades chips or cracks.

Some of the downfalls of painting hardwood floors include:

  • Cracking, chipping, flaking. Your painted floors will be much more likely to paint, chip, and flake. While it’s relatively easy to fix, it might become an irritatingly constant “to-do” on your list.
  • Buyer appeal. Many buyers will view your painted wood floors as an expensive restoration project to bring back the natural wood aesthetic, which may affect their interest in your home or the final selling price.
  • Sanding and refinishing will cost even more. Should you decide later that you want to sand and refinish your floors back to their natural look, the process will be even more complicated, lengthy and expensive.