You've found the famous Dave's Garden website! Join this friendly global community that shares tips and ideas for home and gardens, along with seeds and plants!
Check out the DG homepage for a brief overview of what you'll find in this gardening mega-site.
Login
If you don't have an account yet, visit the registration page to sign up.
We would like to replace the carpet in our family room because it's stained and some of the family are alergic to dust mites. Our problem is that it's the central room in our home, sort of forming a great room with our kitchen, so all the traffic goes through it. The kitchen is ceramic tile and we're concerned that all the hardwood floors or the laminates we like are 12mm thick, creating a possible tripping hazard more than 16 feet wide in the busiest area of the house. We'd like the look of wood, but don't want people "stepping up" into the room all the time and worry that the transitions would be more like ramps than a T-moulding used for same-height transitions. We even looked into wood-look ceramic tiles, but they all looked cheap or were purposely "weathered" to look rustic. We even saw some beautiful ones at Home Depot, but they'd need grout and wouldn't give us the real wood floor look we want. Our favorite laminate was the Pradoo from Armstrong's Hyde Park collection, but it's 12mm thick. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
How big of a height difference are you going to actually be dealing with? I've seen lots of people who've done hardwood in part of the house adjacent to a room with ceramic tile, and I've never seen one that felt like a tripping hazard. There are moldings you can buy to manage a transition from slightly higher flooring to slightly lower, it's pretty hard to trip over those. And if you're still worried, take an area rug or runner and put it across the transition in the traffic paths.
