A floor is just a floor until you use your imagination. Well, your imagination and some greenbacks. The flooring beneath your feet often gets overlooked when it comes time to redecorate your home. Too bad, because with just the slightest bit of effort your floor can become a centerpiece of conversation among visitors.
Decorative Wooden Inlay
A decorative wooden inlay takes a plain wooden floor, which should already look good if done right, and gives it a definite personality. Wooden inlays are the result of laying down boarding with contrasting colors to create an eye-opening design. Don’t be tempted to go overboard by adding too many; in most cases just one well placed inlay is all you need. Today it is easier than ever for the average Joe to add a decorative inlay that used to belong solely to the domain of the wealthy thanks to the manufacturing of preassembled inlays. The design of these inlays range from traditional shapes like stars and geometric shapes to waves that cross from one side of the room to the other and to intricate designs based on individualized customized designs. Those waves of color can be used as an inlay that acts as a defining path from one room to another, so keep that in mind.
Painted Floors
Floors can be painted to create a stunning decorative effect if you have the talent. If you don’t, consider helping out the economy by hiring a starving artist. Depending on the raw material at play, a talented artist could transform your boring floor into something that resembles the 3D boxes of a spatial-defying Escher drawing or even, potentially, a recreation of a famous painting. Imagine having a floor that recreates the gallery of fascinating but frozen French men and women in Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” or the thick lines of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” You don’t need to get so highfalutin’ of course. A paintbrush and a few cans of paint are all you need to create some freehand designs of your own.
Bordering
The simple addition of borders to a floor instantly and painlessly give a sense of formal beauty. A house that is suffering from a lack of molding around the doors and walls and windows can begin the trek toward upward mobility by starting from the ground up. You can end up with a highly professional looking floor border by doing nothing more complicated than buying up smaller pieces of wood from the tree of a different species or a different color than the floor itself. What you get by laying the bordering pieces around the main flooring is the creation of a sense of space as a result of the contrast between perimeter the area within the border. If you add a border to your floor correctly and artistically, you can even create the illusion of more surface area than you’ve actually got. The same holds true for laying down a border that makes a room seem more intimate than it is in reality.