choosing wood laminate floor samples

What We’ve Learned About Choosing a Floor

[This post is the first part of a collaboration with Quickstep]

Our search for the perfect flooring for the bottom story of our house has been long, complicated, and – I’m just going to say it – pretty tedious in parts.

I’m really not joking about the “long” part, either: the flooring samples you see in this post actually started arriving over a year ago -which is how long we’ve been thinking about this – and continued up until this week, when we finally made our decision. It’s been a saga, basically. And now I will tell you all about it, obviously, so I hope you have a strong coffee to hand, or, you know, maybe something stronger…

choosing wood laminate floor samples
So! Our journey towards the perfect floor has been complicated by four things:

01.

Although the largest part of our current renovation project centres around the kitchen, the flooring will cover the entire bottom floor of the house, minus the bathroom. We wanted to have the same flooring throughout, so although I flirted quite hard with the idea of tile in the kitchen, I was eventually over-ruled, and we decided to go for wood. But!

02.

We couldn’t have hardwood, or even engineered wood, because of the heights of the outside doors, patio windows, etc. There just wasn’t enough room to fit in some of the floor types we looked at, without having to do major renovations, which would have cost a small fortune. So, laminate flooring it was. But!

03.

We’ve had laminate flooring for years now: we had it in our first house (We actually went through two different types, and would have moved onto a third, if we hadn’t moved first, because it just kept getting wrecked: the lesson is to never buy cheap laminate flooring, kids – it’s a false, false economy…), and it was also in this house when we moved in. The type we have here is a much better quality than the stuff we’d had previously, so it hasn’t gotten damaged, but I’m going to confess to being slightly disappointed by that, because, man, I hate those floors. With a passion. Which brings me to my fourth complicating factor:

04.

ME. As in, I’m a straight-up basket case when it comes to flooring. I don’t like to use the term ‘OCD’ here, because I know it’s an actual medical term, which gets thrown around way too lightly, but it’s the closest I can come to describing how I am about those floors. Or “those &^**&%^$ floors,” as I think of them. See, because the ones we have are both dark and shiny, they highlight every single mark or speck of dust. I know I’ve brought this up once or twice or a million times before, but I honestly clean those floors every day – and often more than once a day – and they STILL never look clean. Like, ever. I can spend ages cleaning, and buffing and polishing those damn floors, and then, the second someone steps on them – or even looks at them, it seems to me – they’re back to being filthy again. I don’t hate the look of them when they’re clean, but because they never ARE clean, my life is basically just one endless cycle of floor-cleaning now – to an extent that even I can see (But can’t actually stop) is starting to get ridiculous. (Terry’s reading this post, thinking, “Starting to get ridiculous?!”)

I was pretty dubious about replacing the existing laminate flooring with MORE laminate flooring, in other words. But then, a couple of years ago, we put down white laminate flooring in the master bedroom, and it was a complete revelation, in terms of how much easier it was to maintain than the darker wood we’d always had. From this, we learned three things:

laminate flooring samplesHow to choose laminate flooring

01. Light floors are easier to maintain than dark ones

I know I say this all the time, and it’s the complete opposite of what you’d assume, but it’s true: any floor will show up things like spillages and dirt, but darker floors will also highlight dust, footprints, and everything else that lands on them. We knew we didn’t want to go for all-white downstairs (Well, I didn’t: Terry’s taste is actually even more minimal than mine is, so he’d have considered it…), but we DID still want something light and bright – not just because of the maintenance, obviously, but also because, living in Scotland, with its lack of light, we want to make the house as bright and airy as we can.

02. The wider the plank, the better it looks

This us purely a personal taste thing, but we love the look of wide plank floors, and knew that was what we wanted for the kitchen/livingroom/hall. This actually eliminated about 80% of the laminate flooring we looked at, because while I feel like I see the look all the time on Pinterest etc, it’s not something a lot of manufacturers around here seem to have cottoned onto yet, so that narrowed the field a lot.

How to choose the best flooring for your home03. Texture is essential

Colour aside, the thing that makes our current laminate flooring (and all of the ones we’ve had before) so hard to maintain, is the smooth, shiny surface. Without any texture to break it up, that floor will just pick up every single mark, even from bare feet. God, I hate it. The floor upstairs, meanwhile, is textured, which means it doesn’t pick up nearly as many smudges, and other random marks, so our third requirement was that the floor we chose be fairly textured – oh, and also semi-waterproof, given that there are three outside doors which will be opening on to it, plus my obsessive cleaning habit to content with. Because, let’s face it, no floor is totally maintenance-free, is it?

With all of that in mind, we started ordering samples. Then we ordered some more. We touched them. We put them in various places around the house, to see what they’d look like in different light. I frequently whipped off my shoes and walked barefoot on them, to make sure they wouldn’t instantly pick up footprints. Then, once we had almost enough samples to create a whole new floor with them, we branched out, and started visiting flooring showrooms, so we could look at the floors over a larger area (This is absolutely essential, by the way: as you can see from the photo, most suppliers just send out a tiny sample, which doesn’t really give you a great idea of what it’ll look like on your actual floor…), and congratulate ourselves on having the most exciting lives EVER.

All of that brought us… well, no further forward, really. Especially given that I kept going off-plan, and suddenly insisting that my entire life depended on having a white gloss tile floor in the kitchen, even if I had to give up work in order to dedicate the rest of my life to cleaning it. (This, needless to say, was also vetoed, and now that we’ve actually started the kitchen reno, all I can say is THANK GOD FOR THAT.)

Then, last week, a good five days into the demolition project, when I was seriously starting to think that, if we didn’t pick something soon, we’d be living with concrete floors for the rest of our lives, we finally found our perfect match:

Quick Step Majestic Desert Oak Light Natural laminate flooringThis is ‘Desert Oak Light Natural‘ from Quick Step’s new ‘Majestic’ range: these are the widest, longest planks we managed to find in our search (Also the largest samples: high-five to Quick Step for realising we’d actually need to SEE the floor to be able to get an idea of what it would look like!), and they’re also very water-resistant, so I can clean it with my beloved stream cleaner (Always on the lowest setting, kids!), and not have to worry about rain and snow coming in every time we open the doors. Our friends Steven and Lindsay have this brand of flooring in their kitchen/family room, and any time I’m round there, I’m always impressed by how immaculate it looks (Even although they’re fellow white-lovers, AND they have a toddler!), so in the end, this was actually a fairly obvious choice, albeit one that took us a long, loooooong time to arrive at!

Still, we got there in the end, and by the time you read this, we should hopefully be taking delivery of a truckload of flooring, all ready to be installed. I am SO EXCITED, and I’m honestly not joking about that: I’ve been looking forward to the day we got rid of that high-maintenance brown floor since the day we moved into this house (Well, OK, maybe a couple of weeks later, when I realised I was going to have to clean it twice a day: before that, I actually liked it, and thought we’d totally lucked out getting a house with floors I didn’t hate – such innocence!), so this is by far the best part of the reno project for me… and next week I will tell you aaaaalllll about it. Probably in excruciating detail. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, guys…

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COMMENTS
  • Chiarina

    REPLY

    Don’t worry about your life being uninteresting, I am actually waiting for and reading you house reno posts with curiosity and interest… am not sure about what that says about MY life, though… 😉

    April 27, 2017
    • Erin

      REPLY

      I’m also enjoying these posts!

      April 27, 2017
  • I am thoroughly enjoying your kitchen renovation posts since I desperately wish I could rip out my entire kitchen, including the floor, and start again. Unfortunately, I can’t currently justify it. In the meantime, I am living vicariously through you and learning things along the way. I always thought I wanted darker floors but now I am not so sure. I really like the one you picked.

    April 27, 2017
  • Myra Boyle

    REPLY

    Good choice, we had good quality pale laminate floors in our kitchen, hall and dining room (carpet in the lounge though – for lying on the floor lol). Can’t wait until we can afford to replace the grotty, stained carpet in our new (old) house and it will be flooring rather than carpet

    April 27, 2017
  • Helen Love

    REPLY

    Love the floor you’ve picked… and can’t wait to see the end result!!! 🙂 x

    April 27, 2017
  • Barbara West

    REPLY

    This stuff about your reno is all intensely fascinating to me because, although I’m at a different stage, I’m plotting a kitchen refresh and carpet rip-up throughout my 1,000 square foot condo.

    Once my carpet is gone I’ll decide between staining and sealing the concrete (depends on how even the surface is, and estimating whether it will look good, i.e. like tone, stained) and laminate. I’ve been pretty restrained in collecting laminate samples because I was convinced I wanted a medium, fairly subdued tone. After reading your reasons for going light, I am re-thinking that. My yucky carpet is light colored and shows everything. But I had been rejecting light laminate because I thought it would be too high a contrast with the dark wood of a lot of my furniture. Wrong, I thinks.

    So, many thanks for your insights!

    April 27, 2017
  • Barbara West

    REPLY

    ^ like “stone,” not “tone.”

    April 27, 2017
  • I so hear you on choosing kitchen flooring – what a minefield! We are doing our kitchen at the moment (moving it from a poky corridor almost to the much bigger dining room), and whilst I know what worktops I want, cupboard door handles, the type of plinth heater we’re going for, and even the cushions I want to make for the benches…flooring is still up for grabs. Which is pretty inconvenient as that kind of has to be done first. But it’s okay, we’re still removing chimney breasts and adding new windows and stuff and then have to re-plaster so we are still a couple of weeks away from needing flooring, but I really need to decide asap!! At the moment, the frontrunner is limestone tiles. I want pale flooring (I so agree with you on that), but I also want natural and rustic. Can’t have wood or even wood effect, as the cabinets are solid wood, and that would be too much wood!! I might manage to decide before the guys are ready to lay it, hopefully! Can’t wait to see your new kitchen, this floor looks gorgeous, esp against those shoes! xx

    April 27, 2017
  • Tracey

    REPLY

    I for one am loving the kitchen reno posts! Can’t wait to see the floor all done.

    April 27, 2017
  • The Other Emma

    REPLY

    For anyone trying to decide whether to go for a lighter floor or not – DO IT!! We had dark grey tiles in our kitchen that were the bane of my life until we ripped them up and replaced them with a pale laminate floor. The grey showed every bit of dust and dirt and because of the texture they never looked clean even seconds after they had been scrubbed!

    April 28, 2017
  • Rachael Dickinson

    REPLY

    I love this type of post. Great tips about the lighter colour floor. I have never thought of it like that before!

    Rachael xox
    http://gatsbyandglamour.blogspot.com

    April 29, 2017
  • This was a fantastic post to read! I work in the flooring industry and went to school for Interior Design. After working in the industry I’ve realized that choosing a new floor is one of the biggest decisions that people can make for their home and oftentimes it does take quite a while. It’s not a cheap investment and there’s a lot that goes into flooring (such as heights, levels etc.)

    I’m glad that you found a laminate that you love – Quick Step does make some great options! Did you look at any vinyl plank flooring? That would have been my next recommendation because of the resilience it has to water and everyday wear and tear (especially for a kitchen!)

    Nothing can beat the warmth of real wood in a home and even in a kitchen it’s still a very popular option too! Too bad the heights didn’t work out for you.

    April 29, 2017
  • D. Johnson

    REPLY

    Thank you for letting me live vicariously though your posts. I am currently preparing for a big move, so no more renovating (or haircuts, spring fashions, concerts). I once had The Perfect Floor; it was a tiger-eye maple, and I was so in love with it I used to just stare at it, walk on it barefoot, and did extra yoga just for the view. (sigh) I had white, wire baskets for my office supplies and a maple-and-black-wrought-iron corner desk… shelves! I actually had shelves for my books, above my desk, with turquoise and ocean blue bookends. That room gave me calm. Then I had to move! Grrr! I, too, have a bathroom floor that always looks dirty even when scrubbed, and a kitchen floor where there are inches deep gaps in the planking that collect… stuff (yuck!). The appliances are new and stainless, and the cabinets are a freshly painted white gloss, so there’s that. The view is spectacular, and there is a latent opportunity of garden-to-table cooking. We did that year before last and had an AMAZING crop! Have you ever had potatoes with no need of butter? Carrots, same? Thanks for letting me reminisce. I loved the red shoes on the samples! And I loved hearing about the process.

    April 29, 2017
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