Month: August 2016

You may think of your home’s staircase as a way to get from one room to another, but it’s really much more than that. Your stairs have a significant impact on the way your home flows from area to area. So how do you figure out how to improve the flow of your home with your stairs? The answer may not be an easy one to come by, as figuring out which stair treatment goes best with what kind of flooring can be difficult. Luckily, there are solutions to common stair conundrums.

Upstairs Carpeting

When the upstairs in your home is carpeted, it’s important to create some sort of visual link on your stairway. In this case, carpeting the stairs is the best option. Not only will it allow for flow from your downstairs room to the upstairs, but it will also send a message to those who take the stairs that bedrooms are likely to be found there.

The Power of the Landing

Staircases that have landings provide a great opportunity to get creative. The landing can be used as a ‘transition spot’, where carpeted and bare stairs meet. So if your upstairs is carpeted, you could cover your staircase’s upper portion in seagrass carpet to the landing, and then continue with wood flooring below.

Leave them Bare

There’s no rule that says you have to carpet your stairs if your upstairs is carpeted. You can still create that all-important visual link by leaving your stairs bare. In this scenario, you’ll need to look down at the kind of flooring on your home’s lower level, and match the colour of your stairs to it. Then, all you’ll need to do to care for your stairs is to sweep them, which can be much easier than vacuuming them.

Install a Runner

If you’d rather not cover your entire stair with carpet, consider installing a carpet runner. These don’t cover the entire stair, leaving the edges exposed. You can highlight those edges by choosing a runner in the same shade as upstairs, but with trim in a contrasting colour to add lots of elegance.

You can also go really bold with your runner, choosing unusual patterns or a bright colour. Doing this will cause the edges of your stairs to act as the trim and cause eyes to gaze upward, which can also increase the perceived size of this area of your home.

Dress it up with a Runner

The runner is a very versatile product indeed. In homes with hard flooring only, installing a runner on the stairs will highlight this pathway to other areas in the home, and provide that visual link from upstairs to down by leaving stair edges exposed. As a bonus, the runner will also make your stairs better able to handle wear and tear.

If you Still Want Carpeted Stairs

If your home’s floors are bare but carpeting is what you desire, choose a carpet that has at least one colour in it that can be matched to the flooring in the rest of your home. You can also choose to make your stairway a kind of centrepiece by picking carpet in a bold colour or pattern.

Regardless of the option you’re considering, it’s a good idea to look at your stairs from their base and upward, as this will give you the best idea of what your future stair treatment will look like.

The kitchen is the place where friends and family gather to prepare food, share experiences and catch up. With that in mind, you can give the look of your kitchen a boost without spending thousands of pounds on a complete remodel. How? By looking down at your floors.

By choosing new flooring for your kitchen, you can completely transform the look of this room and get it ready for entertaining in far less time than it would take to complete an entire remodel. The key to success is to choose flooring options that are practical.

What Will Your Kitchen Floor Endure?

Before you even start thinking about colour, pattern or texture, you need to think about the amount of use your kitchen gets. Is there a lot of foot traffic through your kitchen? This can be the case if your kitchen is open concept and is used as a pathway to other rooms in your home.

Hand in hand with foot traffic comes the likelihood of accidents in terms of spillage or impact damage. The more people who track their way through your kitchen, the higher the probability that spills and other mishaps will occur. Usually, vinyl flooring is the optimal choice for those looking to freshen up their kitchen floors.

A Wide Range of Choice

Vinyl flooring is available in two formats: as a roll, or in individual tiles. Regardless which is chosen, there is an incredible variety of colours and designs that are available. For example, thanks to products like Karndean wood-effect flooring, you can get all of the warmth and luxury of wood in a durable vinyl flooring product. In addition to great choices, you’ll also find that vinyl flooring comes with a decent warranty, giving you plenty of peace of mind.

Fitting Differences

The many benefits of using vinyl flooring in your kitchen are clear, but installation can be tricky if you haven’t installed this type of floor before. The most important thing to note is that vinyl flooring on a roll will have to be installed differently than individual vinyl tiles.

Installing Tiles

Tiles can be easier to install than flooring on a roll, but you will still need to measure, prepare and lay the tiles carefully. Your kitchen should be measured, and once you have a number, calculate in extra so that you will have additional tiles on hand should you need them. You’ll then need to prepare your kitchen floor by ensuring it is both dry and level, and that all old tiles have been removed.

Ensure the new tiles have sat in the room for at least 24 hours so that they are acclimatised. Then, locating the floor’s centre point, start laying tiles. It’s best to lay tiles dry first to get a good idea of fit. When you’re ready, your tiles can be laid from the centre of the floor after either spreading tile adhesive, or peeling off the backing.

Installing a Vinyl Roll

Just as with the tiles, your kitchen floor will need to be prepared for the laying of vinyl roll flooring. You’ll also need to measure the floor and make sure that you’ve added up to 100mm around flooring edges to ensure total coverage. Vinyl roll flooring will need about 48 hours to acclimatise. As you slowly unroll the flooring, ensure that the sheet’s longer side is parallel to your kitchen’s longest wall. Your flooring will lay flat in corners by cutting a triangle into the vinyl’s corners. Flooring should be laid and cut prior to adhering it to the floor.

Once laid, your flooring can be fixed into place with spray adhesive.

In addition to vinyl, laminate flooring can also be a great choice for kitchen floors. If you’ve decided on this route, it’s important to ensure that the laminate you choose for your kitchen matches the other laminate styles you may have installed elsewhere.

With so many experts saying so many things about what you should or shouldn’t do with your home, it can become difficult to know which are the best choices to make for you. However, what if you decided to go a completely different way? You can when you paint your floors.

Yes, it sounds like an easy decision to make. But really, your floors are one of the most expensive elements in your home, and so changing them is a big deal. However, if your wood floors are showing signs of wear or have been refinished many times over several years, a change might be in order.

Give Floors a Nautical Feel with Stripes

If your home has a room where the family goes to relax, such as a conservatory, this can be a great location to experiment with your painting skills. Stripes can add seaworthy style, especially when in navy and white. For a lighter look and feel, try alternating thick white stripes with grey ones. This style can work well in any room of your home.

Love Shabby Chic? Apply it to your Floors

If you can’t get enough of shabby chic, why not give that distressed look to your engineered wood floors? This requires a bit more work than just painting them, but the effects will be impressive. First, you must lightly sand your floorboards. Then, lightly roll on a layer of paint, leaving it to dry for a minimum of 24 hours. Then, bring the sander back out and run it with the grain lightly over your floorboards until a bit of wood shows underneath. To preserve the look, seal the floor with wax or lacquer.

The White and Dark of It

If you’re a novice floor painter, white is the colour for you. Not only is it the most worry-free colour to paint your floors, but it also makes a room much brighter, breezier happier space. Another great benefit of painting your floors white is that allows you to get creative and colourful with the other elements of the room. With walls and floor in white, you can explore your colourful side with boldly-hued accessories.

If your tastes lean more to the dramatic, then a darkly-painted floor may be your solution. Dark, rich colours on floors will add lots of contrast where walls are more lightly coloured. As well, using darker colours in high traffic areas like the kitchen will hide unsightly dirt and scratches.

Paint-on Tiles

Although this may take some time and experience to get right, another great way to add instant style to your floors is to give the illusion of tiles. You’ll save money and can let your creative side loose. Depending on how much time you have, the sky’s the limit to the kinds of patterns you can paint on your floor. Believe it or not, one of the simplest patterns to paint is the geometric chequerboard. You can accomplish this in avant-garde fashion by using two unusual colours, for example, raspberry and lemon.

The best thing about painting your floors is that it is inexpensive, no matter how many times you choose to do it. However, to ensure that your floor painting experience is a positive one, it may help to conduct some research beforehand. Then, test out your painting skills on an old piece of wood or in another rarely-used room. This will ensure you’re as prepared as possible to paint.

Where it comes to the rugs in your home, you may not have thought much about their size or how they are placed in the room. Concentrating on these elements can make all of the difference, however. Read on to find out how appropriate rug placement can transform every room in your home.

In the Living Room

If you want to make your living room look bigger, the trick is to use a large rug. Which size is best? The most intense effect will occur when you use a rug that’s large enough to place a couch, chair and coffee table on. Using a tiny rug that only goes under your coffee table, for example, will only enhance the table.

This doesn’t mean that you have to try and pile everything in your living room onto your large rug, however. The trick is to place just the right number of items to draw the eye, but not so many as to make it look cluttered.

When placing furniture, ensure that at least the two front legs are on the rug. Ideally, all furniture legs should be resting on it, but this depends on whether the rug is large enough to accommodate them or not.

If the living room is a busy area of your home, consider a rug made from wool. This material is not only durable, but long-lasting, and is naturally stain and spill resistant as well.

In the Bedroom

Believe it or not, where you place your rug in the bedroom will also make a big difference. Your rug should be like a picture frame for whatever is placed on top of it, and so it’s important to ensure that you’ve left a gap between the outer wall and your rug of around a half metre. This gap, as well as the amount of visible carpet should be the same all the way round your bed and other furniture. Uneven amounts will throw off the room’s visual balance.

Your bedroom rug is best placed in such a way as to extend underneath your bedside tables, or so that the rug ends just before them. If your bedroom is a standard size, the most important thing is to create the illusion of more space. And this can be accomplished by ensuring that your bedroom rug disappears under the bed. If you have a queen-sized bed in a room of standard size, then an 8×10 rug will accomplish this nicely.

In the Dining Room

The size of rug you choose for the dining room is another important decision. One good rule of thumb is to ensure that your dining room rug is large enough that your dining chairs can rest comfortably on it, even when they are pulled out. You can ensure the right size of dining room rug by measuring your dining table, and then adding 60 centimetres to each of its sides.

Of course, you can go larger if you wish. If you decide on a very large rug for your dining room, the same rule applies here as in other rooms: your rug should act like a frame for whatever is placed on it. Therefore, you must ensure there is some space between your rug’s outer border and the floor.

The style of rug will be important as well, because the dining room is another area where spills can occur. These little accidents can be far more easily dealt with if there is a flat rug as opposed to a high pile rug on the floor, because flat rugs are generally easier to clean. And if you need to move quickly, your chairs will be far easier to move on a flat rug. Finally, flat rugs won’t show furniture marks as readily as higher piles.

When placed correctly, the right rug can do wonders not only for the spatial illusions it creates, but also for the furniture that rests on it.

Design your perfect rug here