Reclaimed. Re-purposed. Recycled. Whatever you name it, aged wood is in high-demand. This is for a good reason — it’s an economical, sustainable and soulful alternative to fresh-sawn lumber. Reclaimed wood is wood that is extracted from useful substances or from discarded materials and are then restored to a usable condition. By rescuing wood from destruction and re-crafting it into one-of-a-kind antique flooring, we recycle premium species and decrease environmental damage. Look for these unique products and learn even more information by visiting one of our seven stores.
Everyone’s joining the green movement, whether it’s purchasing a hybrid vehicle, reducing our water and energy use, or simply recycling, we should all be doing our part. When starting your next home design project, consider environmentally friendly alternatives to reduce your affect on the environment. Recycled materials typically cost less, and add the same charming decor to warm the spirits of your house.
Bamboo hard wood floors
When it comes to hardwood flooring, bamboo has become a popular option. A renewable resource that grows at exponential levels and has minimal affect on the environment. It’s a very popular hardwood flooring option because it can be stained or painted any color. You can make it look like traditional hardwood floors, or use the bamboo to highlight a unique appearance. Bamboo adds an innovative style to the possibilities of hardwood flooring.
Bamboo furniture or Wall Covers
Bamboo also makes for an affordable furniture material, perfect for kitchen tables, chairs, and bar stools. In addition, it can be used as a wall covering to compliment your furniture. Since it grows so prolifically, it’s cheap to use, and has the great qualities of hard wood. Bamboo is functionally strong, so you know your investment will be around for a long time to come.
Recycled Wall Paper
This is a hot trend in interior design, although you might want to avoid recycling the bright 70s yellow Brady Bunch wallpapers you remember from your childhood. Many companies take existing pieces of wallpaper and recycle them to make fresh new designs. Scraps of existing paper or broken paper are then added to make material that’s completely new. This saves wallpaper from ending up in a landfill and polluting the environment further.
Make Use of Distressed Wood
Distressed wood can come from broken furniture, torn down houses and even old sail boats. It’s much cheaper than new wood, but can still be reused to make quality products. The pieces are left as is, but can be sanded and stained to look new. It’s great for making wooden tables, pieces of decoration, or even a cheaper option for installing hardwood flooring.
Windshield Carpet Backing
Although you wouldn’t expect that you could make carpet from used windshields, they make excellent carpet backing. Tandus recently released Ethos, a modular carpet backing that uses waste from the manufacturers of windshields and safety glass to create a thermoplastic polymer. The non-chlorinated thermoplastic can be recycled repeatedly to divert it from landfills forever. How’s that for carpet excitement?
Redesign old drawers into furniture
Take a chest of drawers and build them into a new frame to create a charming but eco friendly new piece of furniture. This approach is retro and modern at the same time. Professional touches can range in the thousands of dollars, but find an innovative carpenter and you can probably work out a deal.
Wine Glass Furniture and Other Decorations
Some recycling companies refuse to recycle the green glass from which wine bottles are made of, leaving you with a nice collection if you save them from the landfill. These wine bottles can be cut and sanded into charming drinking glasses, lampshades, and candlestick holders. For a simpler approach, plant your wine bottles in the ground spout side down to create charming flower garden borders.
What are the benefits of switching to hardwood floors throughout your home? They are both decorative and practical. For one thing, hardwood floors increase the resale value of your home and make it easier to sell. Aside from the dollar figures involved, hardwood floors hold a special charm that’s timeless and rustically captivating.
Lasting Durability
Hardwood floors can last for 100 years or more with the proper care. Wood floors are the most durable flooring there is. Grape juice can easily be washed up. Cats can’t tear them up. Hardwood floors maintain their charm and classic grace for centuries. What carpet can say that?
Warmer than laminated floors
Hardwood floors are also much warmer than laminate, which can be cold to the bare feet. Hardwood has a natural warmth. With its thousands of pores, wood has a natural ability to retain heat, especially in the winter. Plastic laminate simply doesn’t last, cracking and falling apart after only a few years.
Cleaner than Carpet
Carpet can grow mold and mildew. Carpet is a virtual breeding ground for dust mites and sucks up animal dander, pollen and other harmful allergens that can antagonize sensitive noses. Unlike carpeting, hardwood floors can be easily cleaned with a mop, clearing out any contaminants. Hardwood floors are especially great for people with allergies because they don’t absorb the things we are allergic too.
All it takes is the occasional sweeping and mopping to keep hardwood floors continually clean. It’s a lot easier to mop a hardwood floor than spraying and cleaning a carpet, which makes hardwood ideal for people with pets and kids. Once a carpet is peed on or stained upon, even carpet cleaner is only so effective as the carpet often carries some sort of permanent stain or odor. Kids and pets may scratch or gouge a hardwood floor, but you’ll actually find this gives character to the floor. If smoothness is a big issue for you, the hardwood floors can always be sanded for a cleanly smooth surface. You can refinish hardwood floors for the perfection you seek.
Carpet is also made of chemicals and plastics, which can be a health hazard for pets, babies and small children. The carpet can be accidentally eaten, causing bad health problems. Sometimes, even breathing in the plastic carpet fumes and sitting on the carpet can cause a small percentage of ingestion. Incremental amounts of the chemicals used to make carpets have been found in the cells of people.
Hardwood Floors match everything
Hardwood flooring easily accentuates any décor, whether your house is contemporary or traditional. They have a timeless appeal and a beauty that never goes out of style. You can’t say the same about 1970s shag carpeting. Great for living rooms, dining rooms or bedrooms, hardwood floors look great in any room in the house. You can even use them in kitchens and bathrooms for a classical appeal, although you might want to choose a special wood for high moisture areas. Talk with your seller for special, non-absorbent wood for areas that might receive a high amount of water.
Add a Throw Rug for Comfort
If you really like the feeling of carpet and spend a lot of time sitting or lying on the floor, you can always decorate the hardwood floor with a rug. A nice throw rug can add the charm and comfort-level of carpet, but are easier to clean. They also contain fewer chemical contaminants. You can get rugs especially designed for people with allergies.
Classical charm is always in style
Above all, hardwood floors present a historical charm that never goes out of style. There’s a warm feeling to the classical appeal of wood, and it’s easier to maintain than a carpet. If you have an older home that already has carpet, it may be worth tearing it up and refinishing the hardwood floor. It can add value to your home as well as personable charm. You’d be surprised by the low cost maintenance, and you’ll never have to worry about stains again.
Parquet has a long history, dating back to the magnificent French palaces of the 17th century. But the beautiful geometric patterns, usually quite intricate, have found a place in the finest wide plank flooring and accents of today. Parquet wood flooring is excellent for adding a focal point to a room, or for creating a “room within a room” – a small space outlined with a beautiful, contrasting wood pattern in the floor which divides the space without enclosing it. Parquet provides a particularly lovely contrast when paired with warm and stately reclaimed wood floors.
So, what is parquet? Simply put, parquet is the art of wooden inlays. Parquet is typically very intricate and very elegant, requiring many hours to plan and carve. In the early days, each different parquet piece was hand-carved and assembled to ensure that it would match perfectly. Because the parquet is made entirely from wood there can be no irregularities in fit as there could be in stone floors: if two pieces of parquet are not perfectly sized they will have to be re-made.
In modern use, entire floors are rarely done in parquet. It is far more common to find parquet flooring used as an accent piece, such as a medallion set in the middle of a room and surrounded by wide plank flooring. The elegant, rich tones of the flooring provide a canvas for the parquet, allowing it to stand out and make a beautiful impression. Parquet often coordinates with any wooden furniture in the room, either contrasting with it or highlighting it to really make it pop.
Although parquet wood flooring looks beautiful with any type of wooden floor, many homeowners like to pair it with beautiful and ecologically sensitive reclaimed wood floors. These floors recycle wood from old homes and reuse it, saving trees to protect the environment while providing a lovely classic feel for your home. Parquet inlays fit right in with the rich colors of reclaimed wood and are an excellent finishing touch to any room.
In addition to reclaimed wood flooring, Coles Fine Flooring offers an excellent selection of laminate. With its wide range of color and pattern choices, laminate is an excellent choice for any home. For the green home, a wood laminate floor provides the natural look of wood without the damage to the forest. Laminate is made using an image of the desired flooring which is separated into individual planks and then highly finished and pressurized. This process gives each plank tremendous durability while making the image appear pressed into the plank and completely natural. It also makes the laminate system versatile, as almost any image can be applied.
Even better, the only thing wooden in a wood laminate floor is the name. The actual laminate boards, because of the laminate technology’s use of images, are made with much less wood than a typical wooden board of the same size. Likewise, laminate saves stone. Most people don’t think about the impact of quarries, but the process of digging for stones to be used on stone floors damages the environment almost as much as deforestation.
In addition to reclaimed wood flooring, Coles Fine Flooring offers an excellent selection of laminate. With its wide range of color and pattern choices, laminate is an excellent choice for any home. For the green home, a wood laminate floor provides the natural look of wood without the damage to the forest. Laminate is made using an image of the desired flooring which is separated into individual planks and then highly finished and pressurized. This process gives each plank tremendous durability while making the image appear pressed into the plank and completely natural. It also makes the laminate system versatile, as almost any image can be applied.
Even better, the only thing wooden in a wood laminate floor is the name. The actual laminate boards, because of the laminate technology’s use of images, are made with much less wood than a typical wooden board of the same size. Likewise, laminate saves stone. Most people don’t think about the impact of quarries, but the process of digging for stones to be used on stone floors damages the environment almost as much as deforestation.
Whether you choose reclaimed wood or laminate, thinking about the environment is just the right thing to do. And with Coles Fine Flooring, you don’t have to sacrifice selection to save the planet: we can help you find what you need while never losing sight of what the earth needs.
Mohawk flooring is certainly good. It is durable, quality, and comes in a good range of styles. But Mohawk is only one company of many in the flooring market today. With the internet as a resource, why settle on the first company you find? Find out what exists beyond Mohawk flooring. Enter the world of alternative flooring.
It should hardly come as a surprise to hear that there are floors available beyond wood and stone. From sustainable new-material surfaces to bamboo, cork, reclaimed wood & porcelain tile flooring, the new styles offer all the durability and strength you could want while being environmentally responsible and wallet friendly. Cork flooring has recently become popular due to its unique look and sustainable manufacturing. Cork is an extremely durable material, made from the bark of the cork oak tree. A single cork tree is resilient and easily able to provide many floors from its bark.
Another recent innovation in alternative flooring is porcelain tiles. Although the word “porcelain” might make you think of fragile porcelain in plates and cups, these tiles are as durable as slate. They are fired at a high temperature, making them much stronger than ordinary ceramic tiles and as hard as granite. Many styles of porcelain tile flooring look almost identical to natural stone, but they provide much more versatility: some types are ADA slip-resistant, making them an excellent choice for a pool or other area where water can make traction difficult.
Porcelain tile is very easy to clean. It absorbs almost no water, making cleanup of spills easy and stains almost unheard of. The color of a porcelain tile is also more thoroughly distributed than in natural stone, giving the porcelain a finish and depth that even the best quality natural materials just can’t match. Porcelain tile is also an investment in your home: if you ever decide to sell, the value of your porcelain tile’s striking appearance is likely to be double or triple the price you paid to install it.
Although hand scraped wood floors have been around for centuries, they have only recently begun to grow popular with modern audiences. Originally, handscraping was the only option for installing wood floors: carpenters had to level the boards on location to ensure that the floor would fit smoothly and sit level on the ground. It was impossible to get complete measurements ahead of time, meaning that an experienced craftsman had to accompany the materials to the job site to ensure that the work was completed properly.
In today’s natural flooring market, handscraped wood floors are more of a luxury than a necessity. Instead of offering the required adjustments, handscraping offers such attributes as:
But how does one objectively judge what “richness” is? Is it impossible to achieve a “hand-done” look unless you use handscraping? With today’s range of natural flooring options, that hardly seems likely. Armstrong wood flooring alone offers a great variety with a much smaller price tag than handscraped flooring. Armstrong’s commitment to quality ensures that you get a fabulous product every time. They have the customer service focus that the early handscrapers must have had, the same drive to make the best product possible. But Armstrong doesn’t charge you an arm and a leg for that product.
Armstrong has adapted the handscraping process to make beautiful, one-of-a-kind floors that won’t break the bank. Armstrong wood flooring is hand-sculpted from start to finish. It is designed to look beautiful and function flawlessly. But Armstrong also offers modern conveniences: a unique interlocking floor system that eliminates the need for staples, tape, or glue of any kind, making it perfect for the do-it-yourselfer. With Armstrong’s constantly expanding selection of woods from across the world, you are sure to find a wood you love.
Everyone’s joining the green movement, whether it’s purchasing a hybrid vehicle, reducing our water and energy use, or simply recycling, we should all be doing our part. When starting your next home design project, consider environmentally friendly alternatives to reduce your affect on the environment. Recycled materials typically cost less, and add the same charming decor to warm the spirits of your house.
What are the benefits of switching to