When you want a completely new look for one or more rooms in your home, you will likely think of renovations. However, knocking down walls and creating new rooms can be prohibitively expensive. Thankfully, there is another way to make an impact in your home, and that’s to renovate with flooring. With the right kind of flooring, you can not only help make a small room appear larger, but also give it the look and feel of a brand new room.
Carpet Tiles and Vinyl Flooring
One way to change the look of your room is to use carpet tiles. But it’s the size of those tiles which will make the difference. Choosing larger carpet tiles will increase the perceived square footage of the room. The same rule applies to vinyl floors. The larger the pattern, the larger the room will appear to be.
Dare to be Dark
If you wish to have wood or imitation wood flooring in your room, you might want to consider the benefits of going with a darker colour. Although it’s true that darker colours can make a space look smaller, this depends on where the dark colour is placed.
If dark wood flooring is paired with the right colour for the walls, dark flooring can add lots of drama and increase a room’s perceived size. Rich colours like those found in cherry and walnut work very well with paint in a cool shade. Even more perceived square footage will be the result if you choose to paint or add crown moulding in a lighter shade than that of your walls, as this will draw the eye upward.
Be Consistent
If the room you wish to renovate with flooring is next to another, using the same type of flooring in both rooms will add consistency and continuity, which can also make a room appear to be larger than it is. You might also wish to consider using the same design elements in the same colour scheme for both rooms, as this can also help with the perception of space.
Even if you need to change the type of flooring, you can still achieve continuity by choosing colours that are in the same range as what you selected for the other room.
Width and Direction
Another way to increase the size of a room is to increase the perception of its width. This can be done in two ways with real or engineered wood flooring as well as stone-look vinyl. First, you’ll want to choose pieces or planks that are as wide as possible. Wider pieces mean fewer seams between them. And fewer seams increases the perception of a more open pattern and thus, more space.
Narrow rooms can get an instant facelift by laying flooring planks parallel to the room’s longest wall. When flooring serves as the running board for a room, the room will appear to be longer, as the eye will be naturally drawn along the longest wall.
Laying flooring diagonally can also make a room appear to be larger. And the best thing is that this trick works for most types of flooring, whether wood, laminate or imitation stone vinyl. The eye is fooled into viewing the pattern in an unexpected way and from a different perspective. It also increases visual interest, something all homeowners hope to do with their renovations.
There is no way to increase a room’s actual size without knocking down a wall. The above tips are not only more affordable than a full-on renovation, but they will save you the hassle and cost of going out and purchasing new curtains and room accessories.