Ecofriendlyflooring.com has some fantastic options such as bamboo, cork, tile, reclaimed wood, linoleum and they even will answer all frequently asked questions about each material.  Also, what is more amazing is, you can order samples of all of these options for only a couple of dollars.  When I ordered samples I received them in my mailbox literally the next day!  Not sure how they are so fast, but it is great.  The selections the have are beautiful too!

The cottage style home had a front porch with white rockers, vintage windows and white washed paint accented by light blue shutters. The homeowners had redone the inside. The walls were paneled with dark wood that matched the doors, molding and floors. The curtains were country-looking and ruffled like something you’d see from the 80’s. And the furniture was covered in tapestry-like cloth and brown leather.

Just like a cottage doesn’t lend itself to being decorated with dark wood and heavy furniture, a log cabin wouldn’t cut it with French Provencal décor. Although a unique style is encouraged, a conflicted exterior and interior design of a home is quite the opposite of what most people are decorating towards. If you’re like the majority of homeowners, you want your home to represent your personality while creating a consistent and balanced appearance from outside to indoors and from room to room.

So, how do you create a flow from outdoors to inside?

• House Style and Décor

Be sure to buy a home or choose a plan when house hunting, remodeling or redecorating in which the exterior’s style supports the vision you have for the interior decor. For example, you may love the exterior of a two-story clapboard home in a small town’s historic neighborhood. However, if you’re a minimalist who decorates with ultra-modern furniture and limits your color scheme to black and white, this may not be the house for you.

• Paint and Its Color

Choose colors inside and out that are complementary but not “matchy matchy” since that’s out of style. Coordinating colors are designer smart and visually appealing. Earth tones on your porch and trim will invite earth tones indoors. This isn’t to say you can’t add splashes of color. You just don’t want natural shades outside while bright hues dominate indoors.

• Details, Details, Details

Consider flooring, crown molding, built-ins, the height of the ceilings and the wall texture throughout a home that make it what it is. Look to see if that harmonizes with the outside trim, windows, decks and add-ons. If you want tile floors in your living area with great throw rugs everywhere, a home with a wrap-around porch is most likely not your best pick. However, tile would be the perfect flooring for a Spanish-style stucco house.

Images from http://www.trendir.com

There are plenty of options for redoing concrete that is already underfoot or for pouring new concrete floors and decorating as you go. Here’s an overview of concrete flooring options.

• Stains and Dyes
• Overlays
• Engraving or Etching
• Inlays
• Stenciling

Stains and dyes give you options to add color to that dull gray flooring. Acid stains, although colors are limited to mostly earth tones, offer a more natural look than dyes and water-based acrylic stains. Acid stains give a mottled look that when polished resembles expensive natural stones like marble and granite. Dyes are getting attention because of their broader selection of more vibrant colors and their claim of being easy to use. Water-based acrylic stains offer a wider variety in colors as well. Water-based dyes can look variegated, like stains, whereas solvent-based dyes are usually consistent in color.

A concrete overlay is basically resurfacing your concrete with more of itself. You can change the floor color with an overlay, add decorative finishes or create stamped concrete, also called patterned or imprinted. In this process, stamps are used on the concrete to make it look like something different, like bricks or stones.

Engraving or etching concrete floors is more permanent than overlays since the pattern will never chip off or wear away. That’s because it has been cut into the concrete. After the concrete has been colored and the design is cut out, the lines are uncolored and look distinctive like grout lines. Sometimes floor designers will fill the outline with resin to darken it and create a more dramatic look.

And while professionals are chiseling away at your concrete, why not cut a place for a tile design? Concrete inlays, a stunning and attention-grabbing look, are tiles that find their way into cut out places in concrete.

Finally, stenciling is another method of adding color and character to concrete floors. The stencil can be a free-flowing pattern or actually mimic a decorative item like a Persian rug. For the best of both worlds, concrete and comfort, fashion your floors so that the concrete design complements the coziness of your much-loved furnishings and rugs.

Resource:

http://www.concretenetwork.com/index-s.html

1. Drummond Home – Documents a remodel of a Mid Century Modern home in Kansas City built by Don Drummond.
2. home is a process – “The task of (re)building this house has been at times exhilarating, exhausting, educational, frustrating, and just about any other adjective you can think of. We hope you enjoy reading about it.
3. Kingswood Redux – Musing from a “modest modern” remodel of a 1958 split-level.
4. Apartment #412 – Transforming a small rental apartment on a tiny budget (lots of DIY and bargain hunting) into a stylish living space.
5. Door Sixteen – “My husband Evan and I bought this house in early 2006, and we’ve been renovating it ever since and slowly molding it into our vision of the perfect home.”
6. Aubrey + Lindsay – “We started this blog after we bought our first house so that family could watch from afar the plaster and dust flying through the air.”
7. Pineapples & Parquet – “Fixing up our home in Little Portugal.”
8. Our Castle – “We started gutting and renovating our 1920’s house on June 1, 2008. Join us on our renovation journey while we also adjust to life as parents.”
9. First Time Fancy – Follows the adventures of first-time home owners redecorating and renovating their 90 year old Toronto house.
10. Jen and Dave’s Reno – First-time home owners taking on some big renovations and doing most of the work themselves.
11. 416FixerUpper – “This blog will chronicle our adventures as we turn a 90 year old house in desperate need of repair into our home for the next few years.”
12. Rambling Renovators – “Tag along as we renovate our house, room by room, and learn how to use the new power tools along the way.”
13. Life begins at thirty, right? – A married couple set to work on their new house.
14. 247reno – The goal of this site is to show the realistic behind the scenes process of a renovation.
15. Young House Love – Two young people falling in love with their first house.
16. Picardy Project – “Bringing our storybook home back to storybook life.”
17. Making it Lovely – “I’ve been hard at work transforming my Oak Park, IL bungalow into a lovely home.”
18. Making Our Home – “Finding, purchasing, renovating, decorating and ultimately enjoying our first home together.”
19. 86′n It – “You can take the crack out of the house, but you won’t always find the pipe!”
20. re:habitat – Renovating a pre-1921 American foursquare / arts and crafts house.
21. House in Progress – “We call it home IMPROVEMENT because it can’t get any worse.”
22. Our New Old House – Renovation on a 1918 Craftsman bungalow that was last updated in the ’60s.
23. The Brick House – Renovating a mid century brick house in the middle of retirement hell. Making it awesome and doing it on a budget.
24. This Decrepit Victorian – “Follow along as we try to bring life back to a circa 1900 Victorian house in Richmond, Virginia.”
25. Tiny Old House – “I’m a lover of old, small houses on a shoestring budget with only a few skills in remodeling, an interest in environmental methods, a 1911 house that needs renovating, two curly puppies, and my loving husband.”

Image by Clearly Ambiguous

Another friend had an antique washstand in her bathroom, and had spent years searching for the right basin to use for a sink.  One night, while making dinner, an old wooden fruit bowl on her kitchen table suddenly caught her attention.   Inspired, she dumped out the fruit, drilled a hole in the bottom, placed the fittings, and with a bit of help from a plumber, the perfect sink was born.

Decorating doesn’t have to be a full-time project. It doesn’t have to be a sprint – or a marathon. And it certainly doesn’t have to involve a lot of expensive shopping, mixing, matching, comparing, and angst. Let it be fun. Be creative. Use things in a way that they were never intended to be used. When I was growing up, a friend’s parents owned an heirloom Turkish carpet way too large to fit any of the rooms of their apartment – so they hung it from the top of one wall and let it flow down to  cover the entire floor of their dining room.   The effect was breathtaking.

Let your imagination move you. Make it a part of your life.

Chair Rail: One of the things you can do is to use it as a cute little chair rail that follows the circumference of the room and breaks the wall up between an upper and lower quadrant to decorate and fill in.  You can use a staple gun, or a hot glue gun to fasten it to the wall.

Frame: Another way to introduce a feather boa is to use it as a picture, poster or pillow frame.  This takes the place of a traditional frame for a large savings and adds that extra little splash of color and texture that increases the visual interest of the pieces you are displaying.

Letter Art: A new trend for girl’s rooms is to decorate and use large block letters to spell out either a name, or a cool word that applies to the hip new world your child is becoming a part of.  Think how much more distinct the word DIVA would be on a wall surrounded with a bright, pink, feather boa to top it all off!

• Switch your photos out periodically.  You can replace your everyday family photos with pictures representing the season or holiday.  For example, choose photos of family vacations and place them in lighthearted frames to display during the summer season.  During the holiday you can use photos of the kids visiting Santa throughout the years. And don’t stop displaying these just because your kids are grown!  The fall season is the perfect time to show photos of Halloween costumes, apple picking, sporting events etc.  And, of course, winter ski pictures will remind you of great times with your family.
• Group a collection of black and white photos on the wall.  Framed in matte black frames, this creates an interesting gallery for a hallway or stairwell.
• Have throw pillows made depicting each family member.  This will eliminate arguments during TV time as to who gets what pillow.  And what a unique way to decorate a family room.  You can include the family pet or grandparents who live out of town.  And if there is a member of the family who is away, such as a serviceman or woman or a parent who travels frequently, these pillows are a nice way to “stay connected” during their absence.
• Have a piece of pop-art made using your favorite photograph.  You can choose an Andy Warhol look, a collage of photos or a picture enhanced to look like an oil painting.  This is an affordable and personal way to add custom artwork to your home.

Unlike paint colors or furniture styles, family is not trendy.  It will never go out of style and is always in fashion.  So be creative and display your family photos with pride.

Image by Dennis Wong

Pani, who some call the “high priest” of Acapulco Design of the ‘50s, is best known for the furniture he designed for the chic Hotel Reforma in Mexico City, created (not coincidentally) by his architect brother, Mario.  Refined but incredibly ornate, Pani’s furniture seems to share little in common with the designs of Barragan, an architect who also created furniture for several of his clients’ homes (and his own); profoundly influenced by LeCorbusier. Barragan is the quintessential minimalist.

Juan O’Gorman (yes, he really was Mexican; his father was Irish-born) created spectacular tile murals, but his early, functionalist architectural design got a jump-start when he designed the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the early 1930s.

And then there is Pedro Friedeberg, the wacky, surrealist designer whose crazy “hand chairs” (shaped like a cupped hand) and wildly colorful clocks he described as “criticizing the absurdity of things.”

Some of the hottest design dealers in New York are also currently planning exhibitions focused, too, on sustainability in contemporary Mexican design – a trend other designers around the world are also picking up, but which integrates particularly well with Mexican design tradition.  Maybe that explains the growing popularity of Mexican design right now – at least in part; or maybe it’s the fun colors and happy warmth, especially welcome in grim economic times.  But from the look of things, Mexican style is definitely the place to be looking now for new ideas and inspiration.

Other hot trends to watch for now:

Anti-WiFi paint: created by a lab in Tokyo, this paint, made with aluminum-iron oxide, can absorb high-frequency radio waves, like the ones used for WiFi.

Sustainability, of course: look for furnishings and floors made of cork, bamboo, and even paper.

So-called “hybrid furniture,” like a carpet-covered sideboard recently featured at the London Design Festival.

Then again, that’s not unlike what Pedro Friedeberg’s been doing all along…which brings us back again to Mexico – obviously what design is about right now.

A New Use for the Monthly Calendar: There is a calendar out on the market today that has  pictures of just about every single subject matter available.  This makes it incredibly easy to find and match the subject you need to the style you are trying to achieve and end up with twelve smaller pictures that can help to fill a wall with some minor adjustments.  Simply find the picture you wish to display, and cut the edges so that the focal point of the picture is centered in the middle.  Then, get some poster board and  construct a mock boarder for your picture to give it a more polished look, or leave it as it is and place it in a standard picture frame.  This will give you versatile wall art for about 50% less than it would cost pre-framed.

Hint: This is a fantastic option for decorating a child’s room with Disney pictures that can cost a fortune if purchased the traditional way!

Using a Decorative Throw as Wall Art: Sometimes you can have a large wall that requires an equally large painting to balance out the room. This concept is easy enough unless you don’t have the $200 to $300 dollars necessary to turn that wish into a reality. Well, one way to achieve a similar look is to find a throw that you like, back it with and attach it to pressboard to give it form, and purchase decorative molding to surround the art and complete the look.   You do not have to be proficient in construction and your local DIY store has everything necessary to accomplish this design goal.

Hint: For an old world or country feel use a quilt, for a child’s room use a throw that depicts a favorite character such as Tinker Bell or an action hero, and for an eclectic look, pick a nondescript piece that has an interesting pattern or texture.

Faming Posters for a Child’s Room: If you have ever tried to purchase a frame large enough to fit a poster in you already know how much money you will spend for a plastic frame that doesn’t even look that nice.  Instead, simply go to the fabric store and pick out some ribbon that will be long enough to frame your poster and play off of one or all of the colors in the picture you have chosen.  Use a hot glue gun to tack the corners, and find a bit of bling to put on each corner.  This will give your poster a homey feel without having a homemade look.

Hint: For a girl’s room, use fake jewels at each of the corners, or if you have a beach theme use sea shells or tiny flip flops at each end to give it a touch of whimsy.