Floor covering is often overlooked by homeowners or put on the back burner and tossed in at the last minute. As a result, the floor in many well decorated homes often seems jarringly out of place or at distinct odds with the rest of the home. Since you have such a vast number of options at your disposal when it comes to covering the floor and since no single other element of your house is even going to come close to being utilized as much as the floor, the relative lack of focus seems extraordinarily misguided.
Bottom’s Up Planning
The surest way to avoid making the mistake of leaving the floor covering to the last minute so that you wind up having to make important decisions at the exact moment when you are at a loss of funds required to fulfill your comprehensive decorating ideal is to work from the bottom up. As soon as you start planning for decorating a room, get the floor in on the action. This means including things like fabric, style, texture, color and theme into the planning stages of floor covering as soon as possible. Considering that you’ve got so much space to think work into the scheme, the one thing you want to avoid is getting caught short on your budget with a floor that suddenly has to either be at odds with the rest of the design or that is covered with lesser quality materials.
Let Function Dictate Form
When you are having trouble deciding on flooring, let the functional qualities of the space be your guide. A room that is going to bear the brunt of heavy foot traffic is ideally suited to more durable flooring like wood. Any room subject to a greater need for cleaning up after accidents like a kitchen or family room is an appropriate choice for vinyl tiles. On the other hand, you don’t want to install expensive carpeting where kids are going to be playing with objects and drinks that can easily create stains that defy complete cleansing.
Quality Lasts
Unless you have an unlimited budget, you won’t be able to afford the absolute highest quality floor covering in every single room. If your plans are to remain in the home for many years, however, you want to go with the highest quality that is reasonably affordable. The lower down the spectrum you travel in terms of quality, the quicker you will find yourself needing to replace the flooring. Although it could happen, the likelihood of flooring materials actually going down in price in the future is pretty slim so odds are that you will actually be saving money in the long term by shelling out as much as you can afford to go up in quality so to attain materials that will last a few years longer.
Disguise Your Intentions
Style, color and patterns are not necessarily related only to aesthetics. You might consider choosing a busier pattern not primarily because you like how it looks but because of its ability to hide some foreseeable problems. Heavily trafficked areas are going to create wear and tear on any material, but that wear and tear will be less noticeable depending on the design. A solid crème colored carpet is going to show the effects of rambunctious young children hard at play more obviously than a darker carpeting adorned with a busy geometric pattern. You can extend the lifetime of your flooring even longer by going with higher quality materials that serve to masquerade utilization.
Pets
Even the best pets sometimes have little accidents. If you are planning on keeping your pet inside, start planning on flooring right from the beginning with a single concept in mind: hard flooring is easier to clean up than soft flooring. Any room in which you plan on allowing your pet to remain unsupervised for extended periods of time should inspire visions of hardwood, tiles, linoleum or any of the myriad options available that reduce the potential for stained carpeting and lingering aromas.
