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Cottage Style Tips

Bringing chic flair to the cottage

For many, the cottage is their summer home away from home. To maximize the cottage experience, it’s important to make the cottage inviting and aesthetically pleasing. One certain way to do so is through the floor designs.

Since flooring helps set the atmosphere of the room, you will want to give special consideration to it. The design can have a particularly strong impact you’re your entire cottage, especially when it compliments other existing features such as wood trim or exposed natural materials.

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Set Your Style

Before planning your flooring, you’ll want to decide what style you want to do your cottage in. There are an abundance of options including:

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Rustic: Simple and old fashioned, a rustic cabin is often made of logs or even reclaimed lumber or wood from old barns. The decorations inside may be wrought iron, natural materials, and/or wood. Your flooring can reflect the olden days such as intentionally weathered wood looks in vinyl planks or luxury vinyl with hand-scraped distressed finishes.

Shabby Chic: A thoughtful blend of all things – old and new – shabby chic is both comfy and fun. Repurposing and brand-new items live in harmony when your decorating scheme is shabby chic.

Toronto Vinyl Flooring For Unheated Cottages

Contemporary: Flooring that mimics light wood, like maple, are ideal for modern cottages. Grays and neutral colors are perfect for bringing out the contemporary look and feel modern spaces boast. You can even go with geometric designs of vinyl tiles or bold patterns that are trending. Natural stone mimicking vinyl is another fabulous option that beautifully accent contemporary living spaces.

Traditional: Sometimes, you just want to stick with the basics. If you want your cottage to be along traditional lines, vinyl flooring with an oak look is a good choice. You can also opt for parquet vinyl tiles or sheet vinyl.

Theme: If your cottage in by the lake, you might want to decorate it in a lakeside theme complete with fishing tackle and pictures of boats on the wall. A beach cottage would be especially wonderful in shades of blue with sea-themed décor while a cottage nestled in the mountains would look great done in hunting decorations. Whatever your theme, be sure your flooring sets the tone. If you’re going rustic, you’ll find distressed flooring blends right in or for beach or lake themes, lighter wood flooring with anti-skid surfaces are perfect.

Function: You’ll want to weigh in the function of your cottage as well. Is it going to be a BnB when you and your family isn’t using it? If so, the choices you’ll make for your flooring will certainly be different than if it is a glorified deer hunting cabin. If it’s going to be used for guests you want to impress or to make money from renting it out, go with the upper-end flooring options such as luxury vinyl flooring or engineered wood flooring. If it’s going to be a place to flop between hunts, you might consider linoleum or less expensive vinyl options.

Cottage Flooring – What Are My Options?

Cottage living brings many challenges to the property owner. More specifically, finding practical flooring materials that thrive in both the summer and winter months can be a daunting task. Below are some sample materials that describe why this is the case:

  • Already very cold and hard, ceramic tile is also known to easily crack in cold temperatures
  • Flooring materials that require grout will also not stand the test of time because the grout expands and contracts with environmental changes; this ultimately makes it unstable and unreliable
  • Hardwood flooring will not last in unheated cottages, as drastic changes in temperature and humidity may cause it to crack over time

Tips to Think About When Choosing Your Cottage Flooring

Although, as mentioned above, picking the perfect flooring for your cottage comes with challenges, don’t let that take the fun out of it. With a little forethought, finding the ideal flooring isn’t difficult. Some things to consider are:

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Climate: The flooring that would work well in a mountainous climate that gets a lot of snow in the winter isn’t necessarily the same as what you’d choose for a beachside cottage. For cold climates, a high-grade luxury vinyl flooring with a thick underlayer will help keep your feet warm in the dead of winter as opposed to natural material flooring like stone or granite.

Engineered hardwood flooring would work well too. If your cottage is in a climate that is sultry and hot, hardwood would not be a good choice since it would swell and warp. Vinyl planks that closely resemble solid wood flooring would be ideal, however.

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Activity: What is going to be happening at your cottage? The flooring you’d choose for a quiet retreat might be quite different from what you’d want to go with in a cottage that will have a lot of people and therefore, a good bit of foot traffic. 

If your cottage will house hunters and hikers, a rustic floor would be excellent because it’s already roughed up. If your cottage will be used for lounging around reading books and knitting, you don’t necessarily have to get a tough surfaced floor but rather one that is inviting and cozy. 

Cottages near the beach or lake should have flooring that is not glossy and that have an anti-slip coating. Shy away from finishes where sand can get in the crevasses.

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Maintenance: Especially if your cottage is a vacation house, you’ll want the flooring to be as easy to care for as possible. Who wants to spend their free time re-sanding wood floors or stripping wax from old-school flooring? Today’s top choices, like luxury vinyl and engineered hardwood are constructed to be practically maintenance-free.

Cost: Last but certainly not least, you will want to think about your budget when choosing flooring for your cottage. Weigh out your options. Spending more on the highest quality possible is usually a wise move, but only if you have the money. Vinyl flooring allows you to purchase a floor that is easy to install, a cinch to maintain, and durable enough to last decades without costing an arm and a leg. It’s available at all price points so whatever your budget is, there’s vinyl tile flooring to fit into it.

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Luxury Vinyl Tiles – A Luxurious Cottage Appeal

Vinyl flooring is a great choice for your cottage. But if you’re looking for a more luxurious appeal, then vying for luxury vinyl tiles (LVT) is the perfect alternative.

The benefit to luxury vinyl tiles is that they provide your cottage with a more premium look. These tiles can even appear identical to ceramic, hardwood, or stone. So, you’ll get the all the benefits of durability, resiliency, versatility, and water resistance of regular vinyl flooring, with the added benefit of a more premium and luxurious feel. Even if you’re going with a rustic or shabby chic look, luxury vinyl tile options have you covered. They’re available in a multitude of styles, colors, textures, and have a myriad of finishes to choose from. 

Luxury vinyl tiles come at a slightly higher price point than regular vinyl flooring, but it is an investment that many cottage owners find worth it. Speak with Chestnut Flooring today to learn more about your cottage flooring options.

Engineered Hardwood

Engineered hardwood flooring is basically hardwood flooring with layers. The top layer is genuine hard wood with veneer, so it looks and feels like a traditional wood floor.

The middle layers consist of sandwich construction of plywood or fiberboard and the lowest layer is usually more solid wood. Higher quality engineered hardwood has up to nine layers. Harder woods such as cherry, oak, or maple are most commonly used in engineered hardwood floors but you can find most every type of wood on the market.

Engineered hardwood is often preferred over genuine wood flooring because it is less expensive, softer, easier to clean and maintain, and is more resilient when exposed to extreme hot or cold conditions such as those often found where cottages abound.

When installing, engineered hardwood can be glued, nailed, or put in by the more modern floating flooring interlocking method.

When considering flooring for your cottage, engineered hardwood might be a good way to go if you buy a high enough grade so it doesn’t fade, buckle, or warp over time. It is more expensive than vinyl or linoleum, but less expensive and more practical than solid wood so the best thing to do is to figure in all the facts and see if it is the right fit for your cottage.

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