Know of a good book on flooring design?
Now that I’ve finally decided on the installation of hardwood flooring in the dining room (Bruce Coastal Woodlands – 1/2″ beech engineered wood strips), it’s hit me that I’ve got another 4 rooms to go plus hallways. The house is on a concrete slabe and was built with carpet throughout, including the bathrooms. Only the kitchen was spared.
My daughter has allergies. I checked out the copious dust in the house under a microscope (I’m a biologist) and it was almost completely composed of plastic fibers. I think the carpet is toast. It’s cheap and worn. We’re going to be here for a long time, I need to make the house work.
We want to replace the carpet but how do we coordinate the new flooring throughout the house? I’m thinking of room to hallway transitions and one room to another. BTW we’ve painted every room in the house a different color, but it looks good. I’m especially wondering if there is something we can put in the hallway other than wood flooring that will tie the various rooms together?
Replies
If you have concrete under your carpet now I'd consider using a laminate, which I know many people don't realy like however I don't think you can beat it for durability or ease of installation. There are other options that you could consider aswell, jewell stone, or etching and staining of concrete. I'm pretty sure that there was something in fhb not that long ago about concrete treatments. There is cork although it's aparently not the most eco freindly. Good luck.
I'm sorry I don't know of a a good book to recommend. Many manufacturers offer free catalogues that you might be able to pick up at a home center for inspiration. From a design standpoint, using a consistent flooring material throughout the house would be wise and tie together the different paint colors. Congratulations on not being afraid of using color on the walls.
I was in the floor covering business for about 15 years, not at the retail level. Each floor has pluses and minuses depending on the conditions. Slab construction is an issue with natural materials due to humidity and it's expansion and contraction with humidity. Also, if frequent mopping is required for the allergies, wood and laminate floors are not conducive, but respond well to a "swiffer" type cloth. Something else to consider would be the allergens tracked in on shoes. Leaving shoes in the garage or at the door, and having good mats will help reduce what is tracked in. This would include lawn treatment products, pollen, road-salt, sand, etc.
If frequent mopping is needed, a ceramic or some stone product may be the best choice. The concrete must be level to prevent cracking, etc. Also, many flooring materials have "off-gassing" from their treatments. Having your daughter away during installation and ventilating well before she returns home for a short time may prevent that from being a problem.
Carpet is a dust and debris magnet in my experience. One square yard of it will weigh more years later due to the accumulation that the vaccuum may not be able to remove. Polyester fiber is know to fuzz the most. Nylon tends to hold up longer with less fuzzing if a high quality is chosen. Olefin, often seen in a Berber, if 100% Olefin, can be cleaned with bleach, however, it tends to mat and crush the most. I can't comment on wool as I have no experience to share.
I would tend to want the hallway the same as the adjoining rooms if possible. Then, if the allergies permit, some area rugs might be used to warm things up a bit and can easily be cleaned or replaced when needed. Good luck to you in finding the right thing for your family and your home. You are smart to do homework on this first!
Hey, can you find a way to make the dust just disappear? We'd love that! I just discovered that the "scrubbing bubble cleaner" is super at eating dust on artificial "silk-like" plants and flowers. I don't know where I read it, but it works like a charm. Read the instructions if you want to try it. Some surfaces could be damaged, but taking the faux material outdoors on a newspaper and spraying well, letting the foam turned to liquid fall off and allowing them to dry is a wonderful new thing for me. I'm considering trying it on vinyl mini-blinds. Wet newspaper stuck to the window and protecting the surrounding area, sounds like it's worth a shot on one window to see the results. It it works, I'll post back for others if I get to that. I'm not sure it will be suitable for aluminum blinds. Again, the best of luck to you in your search.
Thanks. BTW, we're back to ordering and going over samples. We'll get there eventually. The bedrooms and hallways are all connected so using the same type of flooring throughout makes a lot of sense. Our carpet is gray and it goes with all of the room colors so I'm guessing a lighter colored wood flooring will work throughout.
We also live in a home where every room is painted a different colour (and it looks fabulous - mind you, I'm guessing like you, we spent a great deal of time and had help choosing the colours). The key to this working is the uniformly finished hardwood floor throughout the house. Our floors were originally installed in 1945 - this summer we added matching hardwood in the kitchen and had the others refinished. The resulting waste was less than a 1/2 garbage bag of sawdust. Imagine how much waste replacing carpets would have generated by comparison! I, too, have dust allergies and noticied a huge improvement in my health when we moved from a carpeted home to this one. We do have a few area rugs.Friends of ours have tile floors in their main living area - the key to that working is in-floor heating (hot water), but if your subfloor is already in, that may not work for you.
Well, we hardly ever need to use the heat (though this winter has been cold), but with the concrete slab we'll have to use engineered wood flooring. The type we've chosen has a thick enough veneer layer to allow us to refinish the floors sometime in the future.
Going with the same type of flooring throughout seems to be the way to go, though we may do something different in the dining room which is separated by tile flooring from the rest of the house.
In terms of the different room colors; our kitchen and living areas share a wall without a door for a break. Right now we simply have two different colors that meet in a straight, vertical line where the two rooms blend into one another. Any ideas on how to transition this better?
some kind of wood trim? Painted white?
I'll try it.