As many of us, mortals, I like to have the right pair of shoes for every specific situation: The formal one, the sporty, the casual, the festive, etc.
This idea of wearing the right shoes, in my case, follows two ambitions: they need to be able to perform correctly in the context I want them to and second they need to look good with my whole outfit otherwise I feel untidy and unprepared for the task; in few words I feel “a mess” which is a terrible thing to think of oneself.
Don’t you agree?
I find that with flooring a very similar situation occurs.
How is possible we still find bathrooms with carpets as the preferred option? Water, moisture, organic particles, dust, dirt, etc have a perfect home in a place like that; a home and a cemetery as they live and discompose there. Nice, uh?
The bathroom should be the place where cleanliness is pursued and expected.
So the flooring to be chosen should follow this premise.
In a home we have different areas with different uses: hall, living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, terraces as the main ones.
Thinking about how you want to use every one of these spaces plus what they demand in terms of traffic, impact, acids, water, etc will allow you to choose the best one.
For example
If you don’t cook very often and when you do tend to make very light meals, you could afford to have wooden floor in your kitchen providing in this way a seamless look if you have an open plan layout.
However, if you enjoy cooking and experimenting on a regular basis wood is far from the best option. You need a harder and more resilient material like porcelain, stone, resins, etc.
The same applies for every one of your rooms.
How well your floor performs will affect the lifespan of your flooring but what about how it looks?
This is more complicated as in terms of aesthetics we have the freedom to have either good or bad taste without affecting our pockets in the process (though there are exceptions).
For those that care about the appearance of their homes choosing a beautiful floor is as important as the purpose it needs to accomplish.
One of the trickiest parts is how two different floors meet.
They need to look good together and the way the meet has to be neat in order to have a beautiful outcome.
Here some of the challenges:
_Same level on both sides.
_If there are two grids how to make both of them work
_If the point or line where they meet cannot be left as a dry joint a solution has to be thought so to enhance the look of both floors.
Avoiding thresholds should be a must when possible.
There are many ways of dealing with this “meeting point”. We will talk about it in a future post meanwhile have a look at the pictures they will show you some cases. What do you think of them? Is it a clean encounter? Which ones do not work for you?
As with my shoes sometimes I choose beauty over practicality.
Is not everybody like that?
