Be Strategic When Choosing Flooring

Whether you’re building a home or remodeling, it’s important to consider all the elements of your home when you’re installing flooring.

“If you’re freshening up your home, new floors can make it look completely different because the flooring ties everything together,” says Erin Knabe, kitchen and bathroom design consultant at Benson Stone Co., 1100 11th St., Rockford. “A home project is like putting together a puzzle and flooring is a big piece to that puzzle.”

While creating a plan for your next project, it’s important to think about textures and details in flooring.

“You want to coordinate your wall tile with your floor tile so everything works together,” she says. “People will come in and say they want a whole project in addition to the flooring, so we’ll do decorative things, like a wood and tile mix.”

Knabe sees people make the mistake of doing their flooring projects one room at a time, which may result in a checkerboard of patterns throughout the house.

“You really don’t want to do more than two, sometimes three types of flooring in the house,” she says. “If you keep everything consistent, you’ll elevate thresholds and breakup, so it makes the square footage of the home feel larger and everything will flow better.”

Knabe and her team offer plenty of support and guidance.

“When people walk into a big-box store and pick up flooring, they might get the cheapest thing and they might not get any say on what goes where,” she says. “We try talking to customers instead of giving someone a sample and saying ‘Here you go, have fun with this.’”

One way customers can help with the process, Knabe says, is to be upfront with the staff in the beginning. The more they know about the type of project you have in mind, the more helpful they can be.

Flooring is an important aspect of a house, Knabe says, so it’s important that the entire project is done right the first time.

“We’ll send someone out to your home to complete measurements, install a proper sub-floor, or maybe even tear up the old floor,” she says. “No matter what we end up doing, we just want to make sure everything is done correctly.” ❚