Everything We Considered When Choosing a New Floor for Our Living Room
Choosing a new floor for the living room might seem like a simple task, but it actually wasn't, for us. There were a number of factors we had to think about when looking for a new floor and that's what I'm going to be discussing in today's blog post. I would have loved to have found this information when we were looking because it would have made things a bit quicker in terms of trying to think of things to consider, but I'm glad we took our time and took into consideration the following things before committing!
The colour of the room
We knew we wanted laminate flooring but a lot them are beigey or brown in tone. Our walls are going to be blue and a sort of pebble colour so it wouldn't have gone with the colour of the floor at all. We needed something that didn't look as warm so it didn't look too funny against the wall colour. We're pretty happy with the floor we have now because it's not too earthy in tone but it's not pale, grey or too white. It adds just the right amount of character and it almost looks like real wood flooring.
The colour of the hearth
We put a new hearth in ourselves around the log burner because it looked like a simple enough job and the hearth that was there originally was like an awful, dark, terracotta colour that didn't really go with anything. It was just slapped on willy-nilly to the point where you could see huge mortar lines and some of the tiles were either damaged or marked with cement that won't come off.
In the end, we decided to re-tile it ourselves, sourcing heat-resistant tile adhesive and checking that the tiles we chose could withstand the heat of the log burner. Because of that, you can only pick one material so you're very limited in terms of patterns and colours to choose from. With that in mind, we needed the floor to match the colour of the hearth, and we found that this matched perfectly and doesn't look strange next to the light tiles.
The amount of foot traffic it will get
We don't allow shoes on in the living room or in the bedrooms, just because we want to keep it as a clean, tidy and cosy space, especially if you want to put your feet up on the sofa (which is light in colour). But even so, we want it to be able to remain solid regardless of the amount of people who walk on it over the years.
We have a hallway as well which sits just off the living room so guests come in and take their shoes off at the door anyway, most of the time. So where it doesn't need to be completely robust, it's thick enough that it can withstand heavy foot traffic very easily. It helps as well that the floor underneath is concrete and it's also had a durable layer of underlay underneath.
Possible spillages
We know that accidents happen, whether it be with food or drinks, so our guests don't have to worry about spilling wine on the carpet or getting pasta sauce on the floor, although that's unlikely to happen as we don't allow messy foods to be eaten in there because the sofa, haha). Either way, spillages can be cleaned up in a jiffy and one flash mop later, it's as if nothing happened. Not only did we want the floor to look good, but we wanted it to be able to take some spillages that can be easily wiped away if and when they occur.
The thickness of the floor
The floor height was important because we're not yet ready to do the hallway floor yet but we know what the thickness of it will be when it's done so we had to make sure the living room floor was tall enough to meet the new hallway floor, eventually, so the two rooms flowed properly.
Not only did we have to think about the thickness of the laminate, but also the underlay. Underlay comes in a few different thicknesses depending on the floor your have and the base that's there. We needed thicker underlay to bring the living floor up a few millimetres. If we were keeping the hallway tiles then we wouldn't have built the living room floor up as high.
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I hope you enjoyed this blog post? Let me know in the comments below whether you've recently had a new floor and what you thought about when it came to picking one that was right for you! I'll see you again very soon with a brand new blog post :)
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