Flooring and Paint Choices for Open Living Room / Dining

Hello;

I am going to be putting new flooring into my open living room / dining room. I am going to use Konecto flooring, I am primarily considering the traditional (which is very similar in color to my molding / trim) or the walnut that is very dark in color. (floor color can be seen here)

I do not want to paint my molding / trim. I also have dark oak walls that are in the dining room that run into part of the living room. I want to keep the couches and the curtains.

We kind of like the way the dark walnut color we see in the flooring sample, but I am afraid it is not going to look right with our light oak trim and dark oak walls in the dining area.

This is the living room looking in from the foyer. You can see the oak trim, the white walls, the dark blue couch, and the curtains.


These are the stairs, also you can see the oak wall, this is what the walls look like in the dining room.



This is the dining room, with the door going to the porch, and the bricks on the back side of the fireplace.


Closer view of the couch colors and the trim and the walls.

A view of the front side of the fire place in the living room, the couch, and the curtains.


I am happy to change the color of the painted walls, I am very willing to go to bright fun colors if there is one that will work.

I am willing to consider any of the Konecto colors seen on this page http://tinyurl.com/2fnvxn for the flooring. The Traditional flooring on the Konecto page is a very close match in color to the oak trim you see in the photos.

The living room and the dining room are all connected, open concept type of space. It's hard to get it all into a photo.

I just drew a little diagram that might help.



I am so overwhelmed by all the choices with paint and flooring. We desperately need to get the new flooring installed because our dogs have badly damaged the old carpet. I am new her, but saw that you had given others great looking advice on several design projects.

Thanks so much in advance.

Jamie Dolan
Neenah, WI

 

I would go with a light color of flooring for sure. You don't want your floor and walls to be the same color. I would even use a lighter floor color than the stairs and molding. Paint one of the walls the red that is in the sofa with the other walls being a neutral.Are the walls in the dining room paneling or are they painted dark.Are you going to paint them? I would definitely lighten them up some way/some how. You have two rooms that basically make up one connecting room. They shouldn't be that much different. Don't know how conservative you are, but I would play with paint samples. You are in control, so have fun with it. Paint can always be changed.

 

You could paint the 2 rooms differently, using a complementary color for the dining room...

I love color blocking. It ads dimension and interest. Maybe paint all the walls the same except for that one that is the longest one coming out of the dining room and into the living room area.

 

HI
Thanks for the suggestions. We are trying some deep red / burgundy paint. I think your right that we are going to have to use the light colored flooring.
We are going to look at the flooring again once the walls are painted. I have the primer on right now.
Thanks
Jamie

 

I'm thinking that trim will have to come up to install the floor? If that's true, you could do whatever you want and just replace the trim instead of painting it.

We have mixed woods in our home, as we did not want to replace all the doors in the hallway. It became a "theme" of sorts. I never even thought about it not matching.

Kitchen/Dining

Living (flash makes wall color appear more orange than it really is)

In your case, I'd pull the both the wall colors and floor colors from the brick from your fireplace, since the brick seems to be a common denominator to all the spaces. I'm not sure having mixed wood colors will be that big of a problem. ???

Forgive all the photos, but you should see what happened when I tried to get too fancy with paint color. Here's the same rooms BEFORE I repainted them all the same.

Living

Hallway wall

In my defense, the livingroom came with blue carpet. After removing the carpet to find a warm wood floor, and after renovating the kitchen/dining, it looked horrible next to the warm colors in the dining room and in the wood floors.

 

Hi Pianolady;

Thank you for your message, and thank you for taking the time to post all of the photos. It has given us some nice ideas.

I am very luck, the clearance on the trim is just right. I am not going to have to remove it. There is 1/4 inch clearance between the finished flooring and the trim. The flooring is 3/16 Giving me 1/16 of gap, just perfect. The trim is all very high quality oak, and it is very hard to remove and pull the nails through it clean. I had to pull some when we replaced the patio door, and I am very glad I can leave it in place.

Your house looks great with the mixed trim. Although our trim is lighter than yours, It does give me a good idea of what is possible.

I love your kitchen tile!

We picked out a accent color for the hallway today. It is a somewhat brownish color. After seeing your photos, I wanted something very similar to your hallway, but my wife and the homedepot lady liked this brownish color better, so I lost that contest. lol.

I got some new stain to try again for my fire place stone. The first stuff I got was too dark and would not hide the stains in the masonry work. I will have to upload photos after I get a coat of the new stuff on. I hope I don't end up with a painted look.

Thanks again

Jamie