The answer to how to choose the right wood floor color for your home depends on so many variables. However, the most prominent one will always remain your desired style and what makes you most comfortable to live in. Plus, since hardwood floors increase your house’s value by at least 2.25%, choosing the right color will benefit you in more than just one way.
By the way, are vacuum mops worth the money? and you can so read about how to clean bamboo floors here.
1. Room Size
One of the first things that you would have to consider when thinking about the right wood floor color for your home is the sizes of your different rooms and spaces.
If you have a large room, then a darker shade would complement it better. It’ll make the room look more connected, cozier, warmer, and more inviting.
On the other hand, if you have a room that is on the smaller side, then woods that enjoy a lighter tone would make the area bigger and cooler. It’ll also reduce the levels of stress all over the room.
2. Light Exposure
Another element that has a significant impact on what color your floor should be is how much light the room is getting and how much is being directly shed onto the wood panels.
If you have a room with floor-to-ceiling windows and it gets plenty of natural sunlight, darker woods would complement this sunlight and make everything feel much warmer. Additionally, this amount of sunlight ensures the dark would not close up the room, so the contrast between them will be stunning and most advantageous.
On the other end of the spectrum, if your room has little access to natural sunlight, then you want to choose lighter colors for your wooden floor in order to widen it and make it as airy as possible. Soft grays, whites, and creams are always timeless choices that can be matched with a ton of different styles.
One more factor that affects your choice of wood color is where the sunlight is most concentrated on your floor. Over time, UV light rays tend to penetrate the wood’s stain and return it to its natural color. Hence, to avoid that problem, some people would just stick to the natural tones of the wood for that certain room.
Lastly, don’t forget that morning light is different from the afternoon light, which is entirely different from nighttime light. So, the wood color would look totally different in all of these times; hence you would want to look at it throughout the day.
3. Traffic
You cannot possibly treat a living room the same way that you would treat your guest room. A living room is where everyone sits, watches TV, kids play, and pets play; hence the traffic in this place is incompatible.
Just like any other thing in our lives, wood panels suffer from wear and tear over time. Some wood colors are more capable of disguising all scratches, while others tend to boast every scratch. Naturally colored woods tend to claim all of their injuries as their own natural print, and that’s why they are a common choice for places with high traffic.
4. Time and Effort
Depending on your lifestyle and responsibilities, you’ll have a specific time span that you can allocate to the care and maintenance of your wooden floors. That is a factor that you have to put into the equation when deciding on what floor color you would want.
Darker colors tend to collect much more dust and dirt, and it shows on them pretty fast. Consequently, if you go with black or dark-red panels, you’ll probably need to sweep or mop once a day in order to keep them as pristine as possible. In contrast, other lighter colors such as beige, light grays, and off-whites can survive two or three days of activity without any visible traces of dust or dirt.
5. Walls
Wall colors are very similar to floor colors. If you have a small room, then light wall paint will make it look much bigger and vice versa. Nevertheless, if you choose a light color for both your walls and wooden floors, it’ll make your room look too cold and uninviting.
The same thing goes for dark colors. If you choose a dark color for both your walls and floors, you’ll feel like the room is caving in on you. It’ll be too stuffy and small. Hence, the contrast between the color of your walls and the color of your floor is the best way to go here.
If your walls are lightly painted, then the dark floor will tie everything together and make the room give the vibes of one single entity. While if your room’s walls are darkly painted, then a light color for your wooden floors will provide a lot of freedom and coolness to the room.
One more thing that you must do before settling on a particular color for your floors is to take different samples home. Place them in different rooms, look at them with concentration, and decide whether they go with your room, your furniture, and your desired style.
If you have more than one sample for a room, look at each sample on a different day at different times with varying light exposure. At the end of your sampling, put them all together and decide which one gave you more pleasure.
Final Thoughts
How to choose the right wood floor color for your home is an essential question whenever you’re redecorating or building a home. If you’re undecided on what style you would want to adopt, then scour magazines and catalogs offline and online, and they will give you an idea of what you like to see in your home.
You can put flooring first according to what you like, whether lightly colored or darkly colored, going with gray tones or beige stones or stark white hardwood floor, and then build the rest of the room according to that, because flooring is always a central piece of your room.