You’ve shopped for weeks online and fallen in love with a flooring style that you can’t wait to bring home. So, you order flooring samples and once they arrive at your door, you excitedly begin to stage them inside. However, now that you can get a more accurate assessment of how this flooring will look in specific areas in the home, you are blown away by how different the same color, design, and texture appear in different rooms! That’s why we always remind shoppers to
get free flooring samples from Twenty & Oak in the home before purchase. Today, we’ll take a deeper look at how both natural and artificial lighting plays a major role in finalizing the right flooring options. Use these valuable tips to test flooring samples in the lighting of your own home for dazzling results:
How Lighting Affects Flooring
Without a doubt, light will change the way that flooring looks in your home! In-store lighting, website color temperature, and computer screen settings are all factors that affect the way flooring appears before you acquire an actual sample. The lighting in your home will help spaces appear larger, more inviting, and offer greater safety without bumping into furniture. If your room receives plenty of light, then medium and darker floor color options can help balance the overall layout and avoid a washed-out feel. For smaller spaces, brighter flooring shades such as cream, blonde, light greys, greige, light brown, and whitewashed tones will help reflect light and make spaces feel more open. For long-term satisfaction, you should always gauge how lighting affects flooring ahead of time.
Order Samples To Test In Your Home
Natural Lighting Effects
Natural lighting is not only a powerful brightening agent as the sun’s rays shine through your windows, but it’s also a constantly changing consideration throughout the day. The bright, warm morning sun will first illuminate the rooms with windows facing the east, thus creating a yellow-to-orange glow across the space. The afternoon sunlight will cast a softer, bluer tone that shows flooring and furnishings closest to their true colors. By evening, the western-facing rooms will receive more intensity, and a reddish glow is created as the sun sets. So not only is it important to get flooring samples, but it’s also important to see how they look in natural light at various times of the day as the room’s location and the amount of time you spend in the room may eliminate a choice from your list!
Artificial Lighting
Just as you should observe natural light against flooring samples, artificial lighting will be equally important to measure in rooms that receive little to no sunlight. Indoor lighting solutions such as overhead lights, lamps, and sconces allow you to enhance, focus, or diffuse light as needed. You can use lampshades to direct more light towards the floor or use sconces and other wall lighting to add more lighting upwards and more indirect lighting overall. For kitchens, consider dimmable recessed lights, under-cabinet lighting, task lighting, track lights, or pendants. Different lightbulbs will also help you achieve the best glow for your floors. We recommend fluorescent or halogens bulbs if you need bright white light to match an open color scheme, and suggest softer bulbs and accent lighting for a subdued color scheme with darker floors.
How to Test Lighting
The best way to test flooring samples in the home is to place them near the windows in the room and observe the samples as daylight changes. You can move the samples around the room as well and take pictures at various times of day to make comparisons later. After the sun has set, observe how your samples look with different interior lighting conditions such as with overhead lighting, lamps, and other fixtures. As you make note of your lighting conditions, also look at how your curtains, paint colors, furnishings, and accessories pair with your flooring samples at these different times. This will help you avoid unforeseen clashes before your final purchase!
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Take our Flooring Genius Quiz and the email you receive will come with an exclusive code that allows you to get 3 free flooring samples from your quiz results- plus free shipping! Your 3 free flooring samples will be delivered promptly, and you can test the lighting in your home to help bring your ultimate design vision to life.