A while ago I mentioned embarking on a little project at home, involving an update to our downstairs living area. A small space, you may remember a few years ago when it morphed into a living room and kids study area. It worked well up until the point where Roman decided to move his desk into his bedroom. Marlow followed suit, and wanting his own little nook, took over the small workspace under the stairs. Becoming a bit of a dumping ground for unused furniture and excess styling props etc, it’s been in limbo ever since and I have been itching to get it back to a functional area – one that can be used as a living room, as well as an additional studio space for my styling.
The whole area downstairs is carpeted. It’s the one thing my husband and I disagreed on when we built – I wanted wooden flooring throughout the house, but because the bedrooms are also downstairs, we went with carpet. While it quiet and soft underfoot, I can’t go past the Scandinavian look and visual appeal of wood flooring. I’ve lost count of the number times people have asked about our engineered wood flooring upstairs. For those who have asked me, the product is White Ash Pre-finished Engineered Timber Polyurethane flooring and it still current and available through all Flooring Xtra stores.
With beige walls also on the wishlist, it was important that I factored this in to my flooring colour choice. Wanting to create a contrast, I was also drawn to those with grey tones. With a Quick-Step shortlist that included a mix of dark, grey and pale woods, I was still feeling a little overwhelmed, but thankfully I had expert help at hand. Soon launching a new website with an amazing app that allows you to pop in a photo of your space and see how the floor would look, Flooring Xtra did this for me and I found it to be an amazing tool. On closer inspection the greys looked a little cool and some of the pale woods blended in too much with my beige paint swatches.
For the final step in the process, the team brought over the range of Impressive Laminate samples so that I could see them in my space. This proved invaluable! I was able to narrow it down to two colours, Sandblasted Oak Natural, and Classic Oak Brown, as shown below alongside some of the Flooring Xtra Rug Samples. We then moved the planks to the sliding glass doors and saw how they looked in the light. One of the deciding factors was seeing how great the darker planks looked against our black joinery. Lastly, I got my family on board and the boys were unanimous – they all loved the dark one!
