Luxury Housing Trends & Home Improvement Ideas

Whether you’re remodeling a rental or just looking to tear our your carpets for something easier to maintain, laminate flooring can be an affordable option. Some styles can be almost as costly as hardwoods though, so it pays to look around before buying.

You can find relatively cheap laminate flooring ($1 per square foot or less) at Ikea and Lumber Liquidators.

You can shop at both stores online if there aren’t brick-and-mortar versions in your area. Of course, those cheap prices are just for the flooring–installation isn’t included. However, since laminate flooring can often be installed in a “floating” manner (meaning it can go over existing vinyl, concrete, etc.), it’s a relatively doable DIY project for those with decent cutting tools.

The picture here shows Ikea’s “Hemse” flooring, which currently sells for 74 cents a square foot.

Keep in mind when buying cheap flooring materials that you often get what you pay for. These laminate floors probably won’t be your dream floors, but they may be an improvement over what you have, and in a household filled with kids and pets, it can sometimes be more practical to install floors that are easy to maintain and yet don’t cost a fortune.

Most of us just have views of dirt and grass below our decks, but if you’re fortunate enough to be gazing out over the water or something equally spectacular, you might like to broaden your view.

Try installing glass flooring for part or all of your deck in order to maximize your view.

Glass flooring also allows light to pass through to lower levels of the house or the area beneath the deck, making that space a bit less dreary. Think of it as a skylight for your deck.

The glass deck window shown here was installed by the folks at Artwork in Architectural Glass Studios, and they offer a wide variety of textured and non-slip glass for indoor and outdoor flooring applications.

If you like the eco-friendliness of bamboo flooring (bamboo grows to maturity much more quickly than trees and is an easily renewable resource), but you’ve dismissed it because you prefer darker materials, consider some of the stains out there that can make bamboo look similar to a dark wood flooring.

Available from Eco-friendly Flooring, these walnut-stained bambooo planks are even distressed and hand-scraped, a style that has become more popular with hardwood floors.

“For extremely high traffic areas or where a more a hand-hewn look is desired, consider our handscraped, wide-plank bamboo flooring selections. Available in Chestnut or Walnut stains, these selections are an excellent choice where high traffic is the norm or where this “antique” look is desired at a reasonable price.”

If you’re looking for floor ideas, it’s hard to beat the beauty of hardwoods, but which species of wood is right for you? And do you want wide planks or narrow? Distressed or shiny and new? Reclaimed wood or freshly farmed? Hand-scraped or smooth as a baby’s bottom?

It’s amazing how many options there are out there in the hardwood flooring world, isn’t it? You’ll have to sift through them yourself to see what’s best for your home, but if you’re just browsing for ideas, you might want to check out this handsome walnut flooring.

The hand-scraped, nail-down walnut is part of the Stony Creek Collection at County Floors. The boards come in random widths of 3″, 4″, and 5″, to give you a unique and varied look when the flooring is laid. The boards can be custom distressed to precisely fit your home’s style.

Yours for just under $10 a square foot (not including installation).

It’s not all that common to see real animal hides in front of fireplaces any more (and those of us who prefer our critters alive and furred thank you), but you can still bring that fresh-from-the-African-Serengeti feel into your home. An animal print rug might just do the trick.

The Serengeti Collection area rugs from Couristan are woven from 100% semi-worsted New Zealand wool, and you can get them in eight animal prints. Options include Alligator, Bengal, Serpentine, Panther, Crocodile, Leopard, Zebra and Quagga (yeah, I had to look that one up too: an extinct subspecies of the plains zebra).

Toss one of these rugs on the floor before your fireplace this winter, and curl up with a glass of wine and a good book.

$389 gets you a 7’10″ x 10’9″ rectangle.

Remember mood rings? You could slip one on your finger and watch it change colors depending on your “mood.”

Now you can get floor tiles that do something similar (although they’re a little more expensive–you won’t be able to pull one of these out of the dig-for-treasure game at Chuck E. Cheese).

These interesting tiles are called “Liquid Lava,” and they’re made by the folks at Jockimo Advanced Architectural Products.

“Liquid Lava Flooring is an exciting new modular floor tile system consisting of liquid sealed within the tiles. The tiles are resilient and when pressure is applied, the floor literally moves and swirls around one’s feet.”

You don’t have to lay your whole floor with Liquid Lava to get a fun effect. These circular insets (you can also get squares) can be placed amongst other tiles to add a little punch and give your kids something to play with while they brush their teeth (yes, you can play with the floor too).

You can also have tables and countertops made with the funky material.

While trends come and go, hardwood floors never go out of style. They’re beautiful, relatively low maintenance, and even when they get some scratches, they still look good.

If you’re looking for hardwood flooring ideas, there are a lot of options out there.

The floors shown here are made from hand-scraped hickory and sport a handsome mocha finish. The 1/2″ thick boards can be nailed or glued down, or they can float over an old floor. They also have a “scratch-resistant hardened acrylic top-coat.” Oh, and they can be installed on top of radiant heating, so if you want your wood floors to be warm under bare feet, that’s a great option to consider as well.

The hand-scraped hickory flooring is offered through EcoTimber and has several eco-friendly features: 100% FSC-certified content, LEED certified wood, and a formaldehyde-free adhesive that does not off-gas in the home.

If you’ve got a foyer area, and you want it to wow visitors, the floor is a great place to start.

Hardwood flooring is beautiful, and marble flooring is beautiful, but if you want something truly memorable, why not combine the two?

That’s what the homeowners here did: their foyer floor is made from prefinished Brazilian Cherry and features marble insets.

It was the work of Treeborn Floors, a Michigan-based contractor that specializes in installing and repairing hardwood floors as well as creating decorative borders, medallions, inlays.

Some of our other posts have featured hardwoods combined with other materials, too, so check those out for more ideas:

• Hardwood Floor Tiles Interwoven with Marble

• Brick and Wood Floors
• Limestone and Oak Flooring

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, you don’t see too many tile floors in living rooms (we have cool weather for most of the year, so it’s a lot nicer to walk barefoot across some cozy carpeting), but in warmer climates, tile is popular. It stays cool even on hot balmy days, and as an added bonus tile floors are easy to clean and maintain.

For something that really stands out, you may want to consider custom tile work.

When you’re having a professional help with the design, you can get exotic colors, interesting patterns, and artistic borders. You can also get medallions that act as stunning focal points. With custom work, there’s really no limit when it comes to design and patterns.

And, if you want to really add the luxury element, install radiant floor heating under those tiles for when the weather cools off.

The living room floor shown here was done by Supreme Surface.

Laminate flooring is now well-known as a way to get the look of hardwood floors at a less expensive price. Laminate is also relatively easy to maintain and keep clean.

If you are looking for a floor choice suitable for a high traffic area (and you’ve got a family full of kids and/or dogs), you might want to check out the Estate Plus Collection from Wilsonart Laminate Flooring.

Though a bit pricier than some laminate options, the Estate Plus series 7 ¾” plank designs feature a heavy-duty wear layer for increased stain and scuff resistance, and the wood-grain designs are also supposed to be rich and detailed. Guests will have to look very closely to tell you don’t have actual hardwood floors.

The style shown here is Royal Walnut.

Wilsonart