How to make use of your flooring samples

Flooring samples

Flooring samples are crucial when it comes to choosing your floor. Such a significant investment should never be bought on a whim, and when every retailer offers free flooring samples, you might as well take advantage of the fact you can bring many back home with you to compare colours, textures, and the overall feel of the flooring in your room. At Timba Floor, we offer free samples of all of our flooring products, as well as our underlays. Sizes vary, from hand samples to get a simple idea of the colour, to larger samples consisting of a small plank if you need to really get an idea of how the textures, grains, and knots come out in the wood when you receive your floor. While you have them, you should ensure that you make the most use of your flooring samples.

Take advantage of the variety!

Whether you want samples of our real engineered wood flooring or some fully waterproof rigid core vinyl flooring, it’s always important to pick a variety, and not just in terms of material, but colour too. Don’t be afraid to experiment! It’s important to get a feel for the different materials, to see how thin SPC flooring is compared to wood, how strong they both are, and weighing the merits of the two.

Lighting

Lighting in different environments affects how flooring looks, be it natural or artificial light, what kind of shading is in different rooms, what time of day it is, and so on. When you see a flooring sample or display board in a showroom, it will be lit in a certain way, and that likely won’t reflect the lighting conditions in the room you want to lay the flooring.

This is why taking flooring samples home and seeing what they look like in whichever room you want them is among the most important steps in deciding which flooring to choose. See what they look like at different times of the day, and under the light when it gets dark. Contrast how it fits with the rest of the decor. It might be that a certain finish, such as a matt lacquer, looks better than a brushed and oiled finish in your room. 

Stress testing

It would be worth testing how easy the products are to maintain while you have the samples. This can include spilling water or other harder staining drinks on them, or walking over them with muddy boots. If you have pets, see what it’s like if they walk over the samples and how they hold up against potential scratches. Then try to give them a clean to get an idea of the maintenance and what you can and can’t do. 

Flooring will endure a lot of stress due to footfall over its lifetime, the severity of which will depend on the environment it is in. A busy household with pets and children will put the floors through their paces more than a home occupied by a lone adult, or an office or other commercial environment will endure thousands of footsteps every day, and needs to be strong as a result. 

When you’re done with your flooring samples and have decided on your dream floor, make sure to recycle the samples you don’t need any more!