FloorTalk – for all the latest flooring fashions

Have you had the opportunity to check out the Virtual Room Designer on the WFCA site? This tool currently allows you to choose a room: kitchen, bath, living room, dining room, bedroom or foyer that most resembles your room and you can change the floor covering from: ceramic tile, carpet, vinyl, hardwood, natural stone or laminate. From the comfort of your home or laptop, you have the power to see what large size tiles look like versus smaller size tiles, darker floors from lighter floors, wide hardwood planks to small hardwood planks and even change the direction of the flooring to see how you might like a patterned floor. This tool is very helpful when you can’t decide if a particular flooring style is for you or if you want to invest the extra money in a patterned floor.

The latest advancement that is coming soon to the Virtual Room Designer is the grout option. This option allows you not only to see what ceramic tile, porcelain tile or natural stone will look like in a room, but it can save you from making a HUGE grout mistake.

As a designer, I can tell you that crimes against grout are made daily. For example, some people think they need darker grout to hide dirt, when in fact all they need is grout sealer. This method will allow them to have stain protection while not sacrificing the look of the floor with the wrong color grout. Some people might think that a color like pink grout is needed to compliment the pink in their sofa – until they see it in the tile. With light colored tile and pink grout, the pink grout is all you usually end up seeing! Why go through the drama of the wrong colored grout when you can get an idea of what the final outcome will be right here.

If you haven’t tried the Virtual Room Designer, try it today. It’s free and can save you valuable time and money when it comes to making a flooring choice for your home. Stay tuned to the blog for an update when the grout option is available.

After you have found a floor that you are interested in, click here to find a floor store in your area. Other helpful tools on the site include: Free Decorating Ideas, a quiz to help you determine what styles you like, a workbook to save all of your favorites in, a tool to help you determine how much flooring you will need and how to place your furniture, frequently asked questions and answers and many more helpful design tools!

Click here for more information of choosing grout colors and changing grout colors.

Have you inherited a floor with oddly colored grout? Is your grout too gross to deal with? Did you make a grout choice that was a disastrous design decision? Have you accidentally tried to clean your grout with bleach and bleached the color out? Good news! The tile is difficult and expensive to replace, but you can change the whole look of a tile floor with new grout.

If you think you might like the color, but can’t tell what it originally started as:

• First, try cleaning the grout with grout cleaner. (not bleach, grout cleaner!)
• If the grout doesn’t come clean, you can try a professional steam cleaning company to clean the grout.

If you inherited a color that is just too difficult to deal with:

• Clean the grout first.
• From here, you could chisel the old grout out and install new grout, but you run the risk of chipping the tile. Once you chip the tile, it cannot be repaired. It then has to be replaced, which means you run the risk of installing a new tile that doesn’t match the original shade. (more…)