When planning a major renovation or remodel, homeowners are often so excited about cabinets, countertops, and new appliances that they forget flooring is the foundation that affects nearly every other aspect of a remodeling project. To get the best results, it’s essential to plan out your renovation with flooring in mind.
Get Your Renovation on the Right Track With a Professional Flooring Consultation
Home renovation planning is an important step to reaching your goals for timeline, cost, and beauty. For example, many homeowners question the best flooring renovation order and wonder if they should replace flooring before remodeling. Your flooring impacts nearly every other aspect of your renovation, from functionality and accessibility to aesthetics, so these are good questions to ask the experts.
Scheduling a residential flooring consultation with Creative Floors sets you up for a cohesive, successful project. Flooring should come first for several reasons, helping Casselberry homeowners avoid costly renovation mistakes. Here’s why:
1. Flooring Takes Up the Most Visual Square Footage In a Home
Cabinets may seem like the most visually prominent characters in the renovation cast. However, flooring actually takes up the most visual square footage. That’s especially true in homes with an open-concept design or large entries between rooms, which create visual flow from one space to the next. In addition to visual flow via color, texture, and so on, you also want the transitions from room to room to be fluid, smooth, and accessible. All of this takes forward-thinking planning at the outset of your renovation project.
If you assume the cabinets and countertops you select will automatically work with your ideal flooring, think again! What you envision in your head or see in a digital representation may be a far cry from what it looks like in person when we arrive for an in-home consultation, review flooring samples in your living spaces, and compare them with your lighting and other samples.
Also, it’s not uncommon for homeowners to change their minds once we arrive and learn which flooring materials best fit their lifestyle and their wishes around maintenance responsibilities and product durability.
Fortunately, in addition to more than 40 years of providing expert flooring solutions, Creative Floors has also provided bathroom and kitchen remodeling services. This means our flooring customers benefit from interior design expertise to ensure all of your design components look as amazing as your floors.
2. Selections Should Match Your Lifestyle & Goals
Renovation or remodeling selections should match your current lifestyle while also accommodating your five- to ten-year plan. That starts with choosing the right floors since they will take the brunt of the home’s wear and tear over the years.
Sometimes, we meet with clients who are sure LVP is their only choice because they have young kids or multiple dogs, and they’ve heard carpet isn’t an option (that’s not true!). Perhaps a busy family has their hearts set on hardwood flooring but feels it’s not the best solution because of the potential for spills or accidents (also not true!).
On the flip side, we meet with couples who plan to age in place but have their hearts set on higher-profile carpeting, which may not be the best choice for accessibility if they eventually require mobility aids (fortunately, we have luxurious alternative carpets for them to choose from).
Conversations about your lifestyle, current occupants, and both your short- and long-term goals for the home help us identify the best flooring for each room or space. For some, that might mean a wood-look LVP throughout the entire home. For others, it might mean a multi-faceted solution: LVP or engineered hardwood in some rooms, a low-profile, mobility-friendly option in others, and a select plush carpet in a favorite den or formal living room.
You want to make these decisions early, because they affect other aspects of your home design, including thresholds between rooms, subfloor prep calculations, door clearances, and other contractor-related specifications.
3. Interior Designs Should Be Built From the Ground Up
As we mentioned in #1, flooring takes up the most visual square footage in most interior designs. For that reason, it’s important to design full-scale renovations or remodels from the ground up.
Once you’ve selected your flooring, professional designers can build the rest of the aesthetic design from there, or you can DIY it. This includes everything from the practical (design budget) to the functional (transitions and contractor calculations for thresholds, subfloors, cabinet clearance/setting, etc.) to the aesthetic (lighting, color, and hue).
During your in-home flooring consultation, we use our flooring samples and any cabinet, countertop, paint, and other samples you have to determine the best combinations for the look and feel of your finished project.
Here are some examples of how flooring choices should guide additional aspects of your design:
- Lighting. Flooring selections affect the way daylighting and your interior lighting design interact with other fixtures and finishes. Darker floors and hues absorb available light, while lighter hues or glossier materials reflect it.
- Space and Shape.How LVP planks are laid, the patterns you choose for floor tiles, and flooring material colors also affect how the eye interprets a room’s size and shape. For example, a darker floor may make a room feel smaller, while lighter floors tend to make a room feel more spacious; this also affects your overall design choices, depending on your goals.
- Color Palette. If you choose flooring with warm undertones, match it with warm cabinet and wall colors; similarly, cooler-toned flooring pairs best with cool wall or cabinet colors.
- Sound. The flooring you choose also affects how sound travels through your home, from room to room or floor to floor. This may alter the types of flooring or subfloor materials you select depending on your preferences for a particular room or area of the home. For example, carpeting bedrooms upstairs can soften the sound of footsteps into the living areas below. Or, choosing laminate over LVP or tile gives you the durable hard surface you want, with a little extra sound buffering.
- Textures. If you choose wood-look flooring or carpet with a dramatic textural pattern, you may want cabinets or countertops with a smoother or glossier appearance to prevent things from being too busy. On the other hand, if you opt for a monochromatic tile or carpet selection, your countertops or cabinet door choices may be a place to add pattern or texture to the mix for visual interest.
All of these aspects of interior design take their cues from the flooring, so prioritizing a flooring consultation early on can streamline and simplify the rest of your design process.
Creative Floors Helps Homeowners Choose Their Best Flooring The First Time Around
Whether you’ve decided your home is looking outdated and it’s time to replace flooring before kitchen remodel plans go forward, or you’re ready to embark on a whole-home renovation, the Creative Floors team has you covered. We offer the flooring installation Casselberry trusts.
Our flooring representatives work closely with Casselberry homeowners throughout the design process, starting with a showroom visit or an in-home flooring consultation, where we bring our showroom to you!
The more experienced guidance and support you have in selecting the best flooring for your home the first time around, the easier and less stressful the rest of the design process will be. We guarantee that working with us at the outset can help spare you from some of the most common – and costly – renovation mistakes.
Give the Creative Floors team a call at (407) 265-9566 or contact us online to take the next most important step toward planning your home remodel. We’ll give you our undivided attention as we help you choose personalized flooring for every living space.
