For decades, carpet has dominated the world of living room floors. However, trends and styles have been changing faster and more drastically in the last few years than ever before. With changing times, carpet is finally starting to get dethroned from its place as the living room standard. In its place, tiles are beginning to shine.
Carpets may have a few benefits, it’s true, but they also have quite a few drawbacks. They’re hard to clean, hard to maintain, and that’s just the start of it. No carpet is completely stain-proof, despite what the sellers might say. Carpeting isn’t weather-resistant, which means that in winter and the rainy season, mud will get tracked all over it, along with who knows what else. It doesn’t take long for carpet in areas with frequent foot traffic to get stomped down and leave a permanent indent.
What About Tile?
Tile is much easier to maintain and can even be cheaper in some cases. Most tiling materials, especially vinyl and laminate, are stain-proof and scratch-proof. They also tend to last longer than carpeting and are easier to replace if they do get damaged. When the floors get muddy during winter and the rainy seasons, you can simply wipe, sweep, or mop away the mess.
Benefits of Tile
There are more benefits to choosing tile over carpet than just the ease of maintenance, though. Tiles also have a lot more aesthetic, texture, and pattern options than most other types of flooring. With laminate and vinyl floors, you can choose tiles to imitate almost any other type of flooring — besides carpeting, of course.
Vinyl
Vinyl tiles are far cheaper than natural hardwood or stone flooring, easier to install, and come with more options. At the same time, they can look just as good, if not better, than the real thing. Vinyl is comfortable, noise resistant, and stands up to heavy foot traffic, too, which is essential for large families and pet owners. It’s also scratch, stain, dent, and weather resistant. Tiles are also less prone to water damage than genuine hardwood floors.
Laminate
Laminate tiles are also just as damage-proof, coated with a resin layer to stay good as new. It tends to last even longer than vinyl flooring, though it isn’t quite as easy to install. Laminate flooring, like vinyl flooring, is scratch-proof, impact-proof, able to withstand foot traffic, and resistant to water damage and staining. Laminate tiles are often favored when it comes to imitation stone floors, as well.
Porcelain
Porcelain tiles, while not as popular as they once were, still offer quite a few benefits. For starters, they are almost always frost-proof. In addition, they are highly scratch, stain, and moisture resistant. However, unlike their laminate and vinyl counterparts, they are not resistant to impacts. They are fairly chip- and crack-resistant, but not nearly as much as many other kinds of flooring.
How to Style your Tile
Tile floors have probably the most styling and design options of any kind of flooring on the market. They can work for modern, rustic, contemporary, minimalist, eclectic, luxury styles, and more.
Square set tiles (also sometimes referred to as a grid pattern) are probably among the most common tile designs available because they are easy and quick to install. They also take far less prep and planning than other patterns.
Diagonal tile floors are a close second for most people because they are very similar to the previous design, but rotated at an angle. These designs are commonly seen in bathrooms. They have the same simplicity as a grid design but add a little more personality.
While most tiling is used on floors, some designs are so aesthetically pleasing that they are used to style walls and not just floors. Running bond (also known as brick) tiles are a good example of this. They are excellent for rustic and contemporary designs and make a home feel very warm and welcoming.
Then you have your more patterned tile designs like herringbone (an interlocking pattern of long, diagonal rectangles), basket weave tile (a series of rectangular tiles positioned to look as though they’re woven together), windmill or pinwheel pattern, and more. These can be used for various home design aesthetics, but are especially ideal for the eclectic aesthetic.
How We Can Help
At Winthorpe Design and Build, we’ve been helping people obtain their dream homes and remodel them for over 30 years. We’ve seen pretty much everything, and have found a way to handle it. When a design-build firm has been in practice as long as we have, installing a tile floor comes easy.
If you need someone to help design and install your new tile design, don’t hire two separate teams. Hire someone like Winthorpe Design and Build that can do both, without charging you an arm and a leg to do so. To contact us or learn more, please use the information below.
Metro phone number: 202-600-2515
Office phone number: 301-854-2092
Link to schedule a virtual consultation: https://www.winthorpe.com/contact/
For more information about who we are and what we do, click here!
