Flooring options

      Flooring for the house was an easy enough choice:  Natural Wood. But which wood?  What tone? What style?  Instead of researching blindly among the hundreds of options, we were shown a number of samples and drew our favorites from there.   Of course, the selection also suited our budget. 

     For the first floor, the choices of woods that we were able to draw from was limited due to the fact that we are installing radiant heating on most of that floor.  

     To accommodate radiant heating, the wood has to be specially engineered so that it will not shrink or crack from the drying effects of the heat.  We opted for a light-toned Oak wood that will darken slightly with staining.  

     For the second floor and the loft, we needed to find a solid wood with the same style and tones.  We selected a grade of Birch wood that was neither too light nor too dark.  We hope that these lighter tones will help provide a sense that the house is more spacious than it actually is.

     For the entrance we looked at ceramic tiles.  The tiles we chose is deep grey with grooves and an overall rough appearance.  We just fell in love with them and think they will match very well with our white moulded closets at the entrance. 

     Let's hope the effect will be what we expect... That is certainly the most stressful part of planning a house, wondering whether the choices we make on paper will make sense in reality.

     We were also considering ceramic tiles for the Kitchen, Powder Room and Toilet, although the general preference in Japan is to opt for wood.  What is the best flooring for areas where humidity is likely to be prevalent?  Certainly not carpeting!  That's definitely the worst and it's easy to understand why.  But we were surprised to see that solid hardwood only ranks 6th on a chart of best flooring options for the bathroom.  Here's the ranking from worse to best:

7. Carpet (water + fiber= bad match)

6. Hardwood flooring (nice, feels good, but not waterproof)

5. Laminate Flooring ( slightly better than solid wood, but still...)

4. Engineered Wood (waterproof base, hardwood layer on top, ok choice)

3. Stone (beautiful, durable, but slippery and expensive)

2. Vinyl Tiles (popular, inexpensive, variety of textures and colors, but still vinyl...)

1. Ceramic tiles (inexpensive, rich texture, waterproof, looks great)

     We hesitated for a while between ceramic tile and vinyl tiles, mainly because we were worried about possible injuries if anyone ever tripped and fell on a tile flooring.  Tajima's Tile Collection is quite impressive, but in the end, we felt that vinyl still can't beat the look and feel of ceramic tile. So we made our choice!  

     We had to be sure to select tiles that wouldn't be too slippery, especially for the sake of pets.  We opted for a dark grey shade here as well, as shown in this image. 

     We hope that they will complement the white European-style kitchen cabinets nicely,  and make a pleasing transition from the rest of the hardwood flooring.  Plus the darker shades will probably show less the dirt than lighter tones.  That's always a plus.