Mix Wood & Ceramic Tile Flooring in Different Rooms.(6/28/2013)

Most homes have several types of flooring, each in different rooms. You may have tile, vinyl, wood, stone, engineered, laminate or other types of flooring. Blending flooring together is often viewed as an aesthetic choice of color, but color shouldn't be your only consideration, particularly if you are creating mixed-media flooring. A mixed-media floor is a floor where two or more types of flooring materials are installed as a single floor. This is often done for unusual high-style flooring or to blend two or more types of flooring materials to create visual unity between rooms.

nstructions
1. Measure each room where flooring will be installed. Transfer the measurements to 1/4-inch graph paper using a ruler, straight edge and pencil. Follow the contours of the wall close to the floor. Mark the locations of doorways, staircases, fireplace hearths, openings, columns, built-ins and cabinets. Mark your room dimensions.

2. Place tracing paper over your finished floor plan and tape it down. If you have an open floor, plan you may not have clearly defined breaks between rooms. Reexamine your rooms by looking at the ceilings. Sometimes the builder will define room spaces by changes in the ceilings. Note the location of any ceiling changes in height, shape, decoration and trim. Add these transitions to your underlying graph paper.

3. Draw a floor transition between areas where you know you want a different type of flooring. Most homes define spaces as wet and dry. Wet spaces include foyer, mud rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms, sun porches and any room that transitions from indoors to outdoors. Dry spaces are interior floors, such as living, dining, family, bedrooms, hallways or any room with no access to the exterior. Some rooms may have a small water-resistant area at exterior doorways to represent the transition from wet to dry.

4. Place flooring transitions based on function first. Your wet areas around exterior doorways should be at least 3 1/2-feet from the door in order to clear the door when it is open. Try to find parallel wall locations that are beyond your minimum where the transition will be straight. In a foyer, it is a good idea to position your transition beyond your coat closet since it is likely people will hang wet clothing in the closet.

5. Position a flooring transition between a kitchen with an eat-in-breakfast bar and a family room by considering the use habits of your family. If you have small children who are likely to frequently drop food on the floor, then it may be a functional choice to extend the wet space tile or stone from the kitchen into the family room so that the tile is under the bar area.

6. Consider mixing your tile and wood flooring together in areas such as a hallway where several rooms of both types of flooring come together. You can install a wood floor in the hallway, which has a tile border. You can create a bordered diamond pattern where the border is wood and the interior of the diamond shape is tile. Keep in mind that the heights of the flooring material must be flush for the flooring to be successful and that there will be different maintenance concerns in these joined or blended areas.

7. Collect samples of hardwood and tile and look at them under various lighting conditions as their appearance will change as the light changes. To make open rooms flow together the undertone of the tile and floor should be similar. The undertone color is either cool or warm. A cool undertone has more blues and a warm undertone has more reds. Look at a color chart to see which colors fall into warm and cool.

8. Sketch in your likely furniture placement after you have drawn your flooring transitions and any blended areas. Furniture should not be positioned over a transition when possible as this creates a choppy look.

(Author Mosaic and Tile, China Leiyuan 6/28/2013)

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