Are you planning on staying in this home awhile? If so, I'd say bite the bullet and get everything done the same. When you get new things in and have to marry the new with the old mismatch, I think you'll regret it. Love your mood board for the kitchen.

I think the hallway has to match the family room as best as possible. But to me the kitchen and the laundry room are separate enough from the rest of the rooms that a flooring change would not be jarring. Especially in the Laundry where you want something that stands up well to water, leaving the tile floor makes a lot of sense.

Personally, I'm not a fan of hardwood in a kitchen either as wood and wet don't go together in my mind, though plenty of people disagree with me. Also, the finishes on hardwood wears, so I'd rather see a different product. GF is so far happy with her cork flooring, we went with high end vinyl...

Thanks for the replies! I feel like I have one vote for each option right now ;)

Because I am cheap, I would love to leave the tile floor in laundry but sadly it has to be replaced due to lots o'cracking and the part where they didn't tile under the cabs...

...or the pedestal sink in the powder room!
{{!gwi}}

I've been considering vinyl, maybe something checkered

This post was edited by robotropolis on Thu, Jan 2, 14 at 10:30

We have this same problem, except that the rooms go dining room>kitchen>family room. When we redid the kitchen we tried to figure out a reasonable way to match the 100+ year old wood floors in the dining room. The family room has carpet which we are trading in for new wood. Ultimately we decided on Marmoleum Click for the kitchen floor. We love it. I love the idea of the checked floor. I would consider Marmoleum though. It is more durable than vinyl that I have had.
Diane

I love marmoleum (and the floor above is marmoleum). It is not cheap in my neck of the woods, but I'll go re-price it at the one dealer around here and see if they have deals on discontinued colors...

This post was edited by robotropolis on Thu, Jan 2, 14 at 15:23

I love marmoleum. If the price is hard to handle look to the commercial lines which actually run cheaper for many of the options. Less color choices but I recently did a large complex and was able to easily find great choices that were economical but also stylish in several different colors.

As to the floors...I must admit that my style is different than many other peoples :) I HATE matchy matchy floors in a house. The reason being that the floor, like the walls and the ceiling is an area where style should be a consideration. Much like appliances though, you have to think about how it will work for more than one period of design history, but you can still express your style and make a room more special by having different options.

I have several flooring choices in my townhouse. They run from nearly black wood in the kitchen and adjacent hall to maple with a dark accent piece in the library, tigerwood in the basement and bamboo in the master suite. I also have different tiles in each bathroom and laundry. While it sounds like "a lot to many, the house flows comfortably because the colors are tied together in their rich earth tones throughout the house, even though each room has a different floor choice as well as paint or finish option.

In my other house we have a mix, as anyone would in a 100 year old home. I like it and will keep it that way. I'd like to throw out an option you might appreciate for that laundry area....how about paint? We have wood floors that have always been painted in the laundry area as well as in the servants bedrooms. Quality paint on an inexpensive wood floor is a great way to go. It works particularly well in the laundry because the paint will keep the wood from getting too wet if that's ever an issue (stain does not do as well). And paint is easy, quick and no biggie to change. I have it in our smoking parlor and dining room as well now because I didn't want to live with the 40 year old stinky rug any longer and we aren't ready to invest in the proper flooring until the outside of the house is secure. I also painted my son's wood floor because it was damaged beyond repair by me (we will refinish it when we do that floor in a more appropriate style to the house). It's a tan tone that gets battered and beat up and still looks comfortable in a victorian home. My other son's room will have the same treatment likely (I don't know what it looks like under the carpet yet).

Have some fun! Don't run the same thing throughout or your house will look just like all of your neighbors...which isn't really as cool as it sounds (ok to me it does not sound cool heh heh).

Thanks everyone for the feedback! I really appreciate it. In consultation with the husband, we decided to go matchy and run maple throughout. We found maple flooring that is exactly like the newer stuff and are just going to do it everywhere (except the powder room). We are going to do a rug-like inset at the stair landing for interest.

I love the suggestion of painted floors! I think we might be painting our stair treads...they are really awful blotchy oak (amateurishly stained) right now. But if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them. Our kitchen cabs (near stairs) are gonna be black and white so I was considering doing the staircase black treads, white risers. Or something.

{{!gwi}}

This post was edited by robotropolis on Mon, Jan 13, 14 at 15:55

My friend just had her house appraised a few days ago in order to refinance. They were knocked down a little for having three different flooring types on the same level.

Wow! That's sad. My foyer and entrance hall are travertine, one bath travertine, one bath slate, one bath granite and the public powder room and the public area, bedrooms and kitchen are hardwood. I guess I might as well look for a double whammy knockdown on appraisal.

Wow, that is interesting! Things are so different up here in Canada. When we went to finance to do renovations our banker was like "So, what do you think your house is worth now?" Of course we weren't trying to go up to the limit...that would be one heck of a renovation.

In our area the homes are all about 50-60 years old or a bit older (I'd say none are older than 1917 in my neighborhood since that's when the Halifax Explosion wiped it out). So there is usually a mix of flooring and additions and so on throughout every home. For example, upstairs my floors are all 60 year old strip oak -- they even took oak from the downstairs to do the master bedroom upstairs when they added on.

Halifax is an old, more or less poorish, city so the housing stock in the downtown area is a definite MIX of old and new and well-and-poorly maintained.

Just ordered the maple and am excited to have what I consider to be timeless hardwood just about everywhere I can in this place :)

What one appraiser might have lowered the price of a home for isn't definitive. One appraiser for our home criticized it for having a superfluity of bathrooms. It does have a lot, but it's 6 bedrooms and has 4 bathrooms plus a powder room and it's always seemed about right to us.

Even the appraiser that reduced the appraisal of Kimberly's friend's home probably wouldn't have objected to a different flooring in bathrooms and foyer - it's pretty common and desirable to have something more hardy for wet conditions in those places. It was probably having multiple types of flooring in public rooms on the same floor that was the appraiser's issue.

It's also to have multiple types of flooring done badly or well.

When we bought our house, it had three different types of flooring in the family room/kitchen/breakfast room area - tile and two colors of carpet - they didn't relate to each other well and it definitely felt choppy to have one open plan area that way. We put one wood flooring through the whole area with an area rug over it in the family room part.

The other open area is the foyer/hall/dining room/living room where the foyer and hall are tiled and the dining and living room have the same carpet. It looks right to me because the different flooring helps define the boundary's between the "rooms" and because tile makes sense for the foyer and hall.

Just venting, my husband told contractor to try to piece new kitchen floor into the old dining room floor instead of my plan of doing a transition and running the kitchen floor the other way.. By the time I got home that night the deed was done. Needless to say I am NOT happy with the result. So I guess refinishing the whole shebang is in my future. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I guess if this is the worst thing to happen I'll be lucky.

So -- the final verdict is -- matchy!

This post was edited by robotropolis on Thu, Jan 30, 14 at 9:04