Glamorous and Artful Home

Wood flooring you need to know

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Whether building a new home or tackling a remodeling project, you can be confident that genuine hardwood flooring will add significantly to the beauty, quality and value of your home. Here’s what you need to know about flooring basics:

What do I ask for if I want genuine hardwood flooring?

There are two types of hardwood floors: solid and engineered. Solid is one piece of a 100 percent solid wood species, easily sanded and refinished. Also a 100 percent wood product, “engineered” is a higher-performance product made by bonding several wood layers with the feature species showing. Many, but not all, engineered wood floors can be refinished.

How do I know where to start?

Think like a designer. Think color. Yes, wood has color, too. Each species (whether or not it is stained) has a color ranging from cools (yellows), warms (reds) and neutrals (umbers or naturals). Some woods change color over time; grain provides texture and interest. Make your choice under the type of light you’ll have in your home.

What about gloss?

You can have low gloss, satin gloss or high gloss. It is part of the look, as are the rustic, hand-scraped or smooth, tailored contemporary styles. How you show off your floor depends on lighting.

Where can I use hardwood flooring?

Pretty much throughout the house. Solid is recommended at or above ground level due to sensitivity to moisture. Engineered can be used virtually anywhere, even over concrete.

Tags: hardwood flooring, wood flooring
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Laminate Flooring – a good floor choice

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Until quite recently, most UK homes have featured carpet throughout.  However, laminated wood floors have become very popular in recent years and for good reason – it looks good, is inexpensive, can be easily installed, is easy to care for and is guaranteed for life.  Essentially it gives you the look of solid hardwood flooring which was traditionally associated with expensive larger properties.  Laminated flooring though can be bought at a fraction of the price and the without the expense of professional installation. There are extensive ranges of laminate designs and popular finishes include English oak, Rustic French oak, Antique oak, Beech, English Cherry, Maple, Birch, American Pine, Walnut, American Black Walnut, Norwegian Maple, Chestnut and Nevada Larch.  However, these days you can also get more funky designs as well, including stonework and tile finishes.  So whatever ‘look’ you’re going for in your house, whether it’s contemporary and minimalist, or a more traditional style, there will be a laminate design which will be perfect for your needs.  Another benefit of laminate flooring is that is increasingly seen as the flooring style of choice by many people, and many estate agents will say that it is definitely a selling feature of any home.

Laminates in kitchens and bathrooms
Until recently, laminates were not recommended for use in ‘wet’ areas like kitchens and bathrooms.  But the quality has improved so dramatically over the last few years, that there are now products available that can be used in these most important rooms of the house – and they still carry a lifetime guarantee (or a twenty year guarantee for the bathroom).  This new generation of laminates is being snapped up by homeowners who love the versatility of having them – easy to clean and lovely and warm underfoot.

Installation
Unlike traditional solid wood flooring which needs an expert carpenter to lay it, laminate flooring is very easy to install.  With help from a fact sheet, anybody (even somebody who wouldn’t class themselves as a DIY-er) could make a good job of it.  The flooring has been designed to make installation as easy as possible, and it because it just ‘clicks’ together, once started, a room can soon be covered.  Therefore, if you’re looking to do a quick and spectacular transformation of a room, laminate flooring is definitely a good choice.

Laminate flooring: what is it?
OK, some technical information.  Laminate flooring is made up of four layers – a base layer which stabalises the product, a second layer which has an HDF core, followed by a photographic paper image of the finish (oak wood planks for example) and then finally, an extremely hardwearing and durable laminate coating.  The thinner the laminate (from 7mm) the cheaper it is, but all products these days are hardwearing and offer a lifetime guarantee or twenty year guarantee when specifically designed for the bathroom.

So whether you’re choosing a floor for a family home that you intend to live in for a long time, or refurbishing a property for rental or sale, you can be assured that laminate flooring is a good choice.

Tags: floor, Flooring, floors, laminate, laminate floor, laminate flooring, laminate floors
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Laminate Flooring is easy to install

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Most people who buy laminate flooring do so because they want hard flooring, but can’t afford wood. But how does laminate flooring compare to wood? Is it a good alternative, or a case of ‘you get what you pay for’?

Well, that depends on what’s important to you. The biggest advantage of laminate flooring, apart from its attractive price point, is that it is so easy to install: you can do it yourself, quite easily, which is far from the case with wood flooring. Laminate systems tend to be designed like a jigsaw puzzle, to quickly and easily snap together.

Laminate flooring is also often sturdier than wood – it is very hard wearing, to the point where a cheap shop like Ikea can give a much longer guarantee on their laminates than most wood floor shops can. It won’t fade or dent easily.

While it’s no easier to clean that wood, it’s worth mentioning that it’s an awful lot easier to clean laminate that it is to clean carpet, if you were also considering putting that on your floor. Between the quality of wood and the cheapness of laminate, it’s hardly even worth considering carpet as an option these days.

However, there are also quite a few disadvantages to laminate flooring. The first is the look and sound of it: it looks fake, and it sounds hollow. While the sound can be fixed with an underlay, the look will never be as unique as wood, as wood is naturally formed on a tree and every floor is different. Laminate flooring is basically like sticking a bunch of repeating posters to your floor with a picture of some wood on them – hardly the same.

Also, laminate floors will often curl up and get spoiled if you drop water or other liquids on them. This generally makes them unsuitable for bathroom and kitchen use, unless they have been specially treated for it.

Tags: Flooring, laminate, laminate flooring, wood
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Laminate Flooring – plenty of designs

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

One of the greatest advantages of laminate flooring is the sheer selection of different patterns you can have on it. While real wood flooring comes in one look – that is, wood – laminate can have almost anything on it. It is, after all, just a picture printed on a piece of fibreboard, and it’s not difficult to get photos of different materials, even very exotic ones.

Wood effect floors are obviously the most popular, but they don’t necessarily have to be natural-looking wood. Many people go for wood-effect floors in odd colours, such as blue or black, or ones that fit together to make a big picture that would never occur in nature.

After wood patterns, the second most popular thing to have on laminate is stone. Stone-pattern laminate can be surprisingly convincing if it is well printed and put together, and gives your home a great ‘old castle’ look and feel. You don’t get the uneven surface of stone, but then again many people see that as an advantage over real stone – and the floor doesn’t get really cold in the winter, either!

Ceramic is another popular option, especially when it has been fitted with a damp-proof membrane for use in bathrooms and kitchens. It recreates the look of a tile floor, but without the dangers of slipping when it gets wet, or the tendency of tiles to collect dirt and other nasty things in the cracks between them.

But there are plenty of designs that are more unusual than this – far too many to list here, in fact. The best thing to do is to go down to your local laminate flooring showroom, where they will have a whole range of products, from the realistic to the simply ridiculous. Once you realise that you’re no longer limited about what your floor could look like, it can be very liberating from a design point of view.

Tags: Flooring, laminate, laminate flooring, wood
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