Benefits of Hardwood Flooring

Dear Rob:

I’m considering hardwood floors, but considering how they will cost, I’m worried that I’m going to have “buyer’s remorse” when everything is said and done. Can you please tell me more about the benefits of using hardwood flooring?

-Suzan in Colorado

Dear Suzan:

There are many benefits of hardwood flooring, and to many, its advantages far out weigh the few disadvantages. Hardwood is a financially a significant investment, but one that is often well worth it.

Hardwood is a long lasting and durable floor covering. You know when you purchase a hardwood floor that it will last as long as you live in the home and probably as last as long as the home does! Because they are so long lasting, hardwood floors can set the stage for the whole design scheme. It can be a great place to start the decorating process because it is a piece of the puzzle that will probably not change, unlike furniture and paint colors.

Despite their longevity, hardwood floors remain fairly versatile. When hardwood floors are sanded and refinished, you can take the opportunity to change the look of the floor by using a stain or changing your stain color to suite new decorating tastes. This option can change the whole look of your home. It is not an easy or inexpensive process, but it can give your floor a whole new look.

It doesn’t seem to matter what type of wood species you choose or what stain you choose to use, a hardwood floor always seems to make an area warm, rich and inviting. Even a light maple with a clear stain can make a contemporary setting warm and inviting.

Hardwood floors are one of the easiest floor coverings to maintain. As long as there are mats at each entrance to trap dirt before it reaches your floors, the floors are swept regularly and the right cleaners are used for stains and spills, maintaining a hardwood floor is a breeze.

There are many, many design choices when choosing hardwood flooring. You can get hardwood in a plank or a strip (narrow or wide), handscraped or traditional, pre-finished or site finished, beveled edges or non beveled, dark stains or light stains, warm stains or clear stains, species with a lot of grain or species with very little grain, character marks or smooth floors without character marks, etc. There is a hardwood floor choice for any design scheme.

Best of all, hardwood floors can also increase your homes value. Now that’s a real benefit!

If you are considering hardwood floors, keep these benefits in mind when comparing other types of floor covering. While these benefits may not suit your budget or your lifestyle and you may want to choose something else, those that do choose hardwood floors, are almost can guaranteed a long lasting, beautiful investment in their home.

-Rob

How Floor Coverings Affect the Size and Feel of Your Room

Dear Rob:

The rooms in my home are small, so I’d like to choose a flooring that will help them feel bigger. Any tips?

-Rita in Texas

Dear Rita:

Floor coverings are an important part of your home. Its main purpose is obviously functional, but there are decorative aspects that can help determine the way a room feels. Depending on the type of flooring you choose, a room can feel intimate, spacious, cold, warm, inviting, large or small.

For example, darker or warm color schemes will make a room feel more intimate. Lighter and cooler colors will make a room feel less intimate.

People often think that dark floors will make a room feel smaller, but this is not necessarily true. Dark floors will only make a room feel smaller if there is insufficient lighting either from windows or overhead lighting sources or the walls are painted a darker color in combination with the dark floors. The opposite is also false. Light floors will not make your room feel larger if the walls are painted a darker color and there is insufficient lighting.

The size of the flooring you use can help determine how large or small a room feels. You might not think that a wide width hardwood or large format tile (12×12 or larger) belongs in a powder room, but they actually can help visually increase the size of the room. The fewer lines there are for your eyes to intercept, the larger the space will feel. As long as the tile or piece of hardwood can be repeated more than twice, the larger format will look great!

A larger tile in a larger area also helps maintain the spaciousness of a room. Using a small tile (smaller than 12×12) in a larger room will break up the room with so many lines that in can, in fact feel smaller.

Flooring patterns can also have an effect on the way a room feels. More complicated patterns are better suited for larger rooms where more restful patterns are better suited for smaller rooms. As an example, if you have a large room a modular pattern with large format tiles (18×18 or 20×20) can increase the size of the room more than if a 12×12 tile was laid straight. Generally speaking, turning the tile on the diagonal or laying the tile at a 45 degree angle will make a room appear larger.

To determine how a flooring pattern will make a room feel, you can start with a simple drawing on graph paper. Lay your room out to scale and draw the pattern in. Seeing a pattern laid out on paper can help you visualize the pattern and determine if it will be too busy or too simple for the space. You may find that you can save money by eliminating pieces, or you may find that adding a pattern will help the overall look of the room.

If you are not sure about a selection you have made or you are not a person that can visualize, the easiest thing to do is to pick up some home decorating magazines and look at the pictures. All of these examples will become clear! Look at wall color combinations, flooring patterns and tile or hardwood sizes in relation to the size of the room.

-Rob

Choosing Flooring and Other Design Elements Using Product Samples

Dear Rob:

I’m in the planning stages of a complete home remodel, and I’m feeling hopelessly overwhelmed.  I need to pick flooring finishes, paint colors, tile . . . everything.  As I move from store to store, and back to my home, I’m having a terrible time matching materials and deciding how they will “go together” from a design standpoint.  Please help!

-Janet in Kentucky

Dear Janet:

Flooring samples can help make the selection process for flooring much easier. Since flooring is such a major purchase in the home most products are available where you can take the samples with you in order to look at them with other selections. It is important to look at the samples in the light where they will be installed as well as with other selections such as paint, cabinetry and furniture.

However, the samples are just that – samples. They are not the exact final product that you will receive. They are made at a different time under different conditions and may not be exactly the same color as what you saw in the retail store.  You can expect them to be very close, but not exact.

When looking at samples in your home, ask for the largest size sample you can get. When shopping for hardwood and tile, ask for samples with multiple pieces or multiple loose pieces. This will give you an idea if you can expect the product to have a range of color. This will also help you imagine what more of the product will look like.

Once you get the samples and bring them home, set them on the floor in the area they will be installed. Place the samples in different parts of the room and look at them at different times of the day (to view them in different light). When looking at the samples, back away from them a few feet and look at the samples standing up. People often have a tendency to examine samples for color several inches from the sample. This is not how you look at the floor everyday!

It is also a good idea to designate a bag for samples if you are working on a project with multiple finishes. That way, you will always have all of the elements of the room together when you are shopping for more pieces of the project. Your mind can never quite remember the exact shade of something and you don’t want to make a mistake buying something that you cannot use or worse, something you cannot return.

Another tool that can help you envision what your floor will look like once installed is the Virtual Room Designer, which lets you choose different types of flooring and view it in different room applications.  You can click here to take a look.

Remember if you check out a sample from a retail store to return the sample when you have finished. There is nothing more frustrating than wanting to see or check out a sample and not being able to because someone hasn’t returned it when they were finished. Some retailers will order samples for you to keep. When you finish with carpet samples, you can reuse them or return them to the store. Some uses for old carpet samples are mats for the trunk of your car, great seats for little ones in school or comfortable places for pets to rest.

-Rob

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