Loft Planning Progress – We’ve Made The First Interior Decision

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Although we still don’t have a confirmed start date for building work to start on our loft conversion, we have started to make some progress on planning what the space will look like.

We already have planning permission and therefore we already know the size and shape that the rooms in the loft will be, but all interior design decisions like furniture choices, finishes and fixtures & fittings aren’t yet decided.

As always there are a few big decisions to make that will heavily impact the rest of the design. Whilst you can easily change the colour of your walls, any accessories or even your furniture if you’d decide that you don’t like it, there are a few things that should be right from the start. It’s the big-ticket items that really need to be carefully thought about. For us, these items are the built-in furniture in the eaves and possibly in our walk-in wardrobe as well as some of the fixtures and fittings like lighting, doors, hardware and flooring.

We have of course already been busy pinning some inspiration on Pinterest. (You can check our loft conversion Pinterest board here.)

There’s just so much choice – but we have now made at least one decision and have decided on our floors!

It’s no secret that we love our original wooden floors. They’re in almost every room of our house and definitely add character to the rooms.

As the loft conversion will be a completely new addition to our house, we don’t have any original floorboards to restore. We’ve already looked at a few different possibilities and have decided that the best option for us is to install engineered wood flooring.

There are a few reasons for choosing wood floors. For us, wood makes the best home flooring. It’s modern, comes in countless styles to suit all tastes and it’s easy to maintain and keep clean. We know we want a real wood floor (I hate laminate flooring with a passion), it has to be hard-wearing, it has to match the look and feel of the rest of our home and, of course, it has to be a floor that we can lay ourselves. As always cost is an important consideration, too – engineered floors are in general cheaper than solid wood floors as only the top layer is solid wood.

In terms of design, we would like to go for a finish that’s much darker than the floors in the rest of our house. As the loft will be our master bedroom, dressing room and en-suite, we’d like it to have a fairly luxurious and grown-up feel. We also think that the dark floor will give the room an elegant look.

We’d love something like this dark brown-black Carbon Maple which we think will look both modern and elegant at the same time.

The plan is to install the same flooring throughout the whole loft except of course for in the bathroom and toilet areas where we’re planning on having slate tiles. (You can read more about our plans for the en-suite here). Having the same flooring without thresholds will make the space feel larger as you don’t have any visual barriers. We might still add a rug under the bed, but in general, we prefer the clean and sleek look of the wooden floor.

Because we’re planning on installing the floor ourselves, we’re opting for a tongue and groove joining system and a float installation. This means that the planks aren’t glued to the subfloor or underlay and they are just connected to the surrounding boards – ideal for us DIYers!

These are some of the alternatives that we looked at:

Now that we’ve narrowed down our choice of flooring, it’s time to start ordering some samples and making a final decision on the type of wood and colour.

What’s your favourite type of floor? Do you prefer a fluffy carpet or wooden floors? Do you think we should choose a light floor or a dark floor?