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Home Decorating

Question about baseboard color

13 years ago

Hi Everyone,

I have "natural" oak cabinets, doors, baseboard, stair railing, fireplace mantel, kitchen island, etc. We are going to replace our living room carpet and kitchen sheet vinyl with wood-look flooring (not real wood). From what I have read, it is best not to try to "match" woods when installing a new wood-look floor--you should either go lighter or darker. Given that the wood currently in place is fairly light, we have decided to go darker. Right now we have several samples lying around on the floor to try to finalize a selection. However, one thing I have noticed is that when a sample is next to a light oak baseboard it does not look right to me. Should we plan to leave the baseboards the same color as the rest of the wood in the house, or should we re-do the baseboards so that they are compatible with the new floor? The flooring does not have matching baseboards available, but I am sure that we could get some unfinished baseboards and then stain them so that they match the "fake wood" of the floor? If anyone has done this--either way--it would be great to see pictures. Thank you very much for your advice and experience. :)

Marci

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Comments (3)

susanjf_gw
13 years ago
i sure would try staining the existing bb's you have instead of going to the expense of replacing...if you find stain you like...
kismet08
13 years ago
I feel your pain. We've been considering replacing our sheet vinyl as well, and we have stained everything. Ours is all maple instead of oak, and its stained in a honey tone that simply comes off as orange. Our entry hardwoods are stained to match it as well, and bringing all that orange into such a large area as the kitchen/dining/hall, etc..would literally hurt the eyes. We were trying to find a prefinished solid wood product that we could get to "compliment" and we still had a hard time making anything work. We just settled on going with a luxury vinyl tile that will work with the exisiting stain, and if we decide to paint later, it will still look fine.

IMO, you will have a VERY hard time finding a real wood baseboard that will look right with a vinyl wood look floor. They will fight each other, and the real one will just end up making the vinyl look..well fake. If you really want to make it come off as realistic as possible, I'd go with painted baseboards. My two cents; your mileage may vary...
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Hi Lukkiirish. Painting the doors the same color as the rest of the trim has always been the way they do things in Europe. France has never seen a painted door it didn't like. On the other hand, doors stained--generally mahogany, since that was the fashionable wood at the time--to contrast with white trim became the standard in important houses in 18th Century England. And since what we call 'Colonial' is merely a simplified version of what's considered Georgian style decor in England, places like the White House have combined stained doors with painted trim for more than 200 years now. It's all good. Baseboards often match the rest of the trim, but not always. In grand houses they were often colored marble, and in less important houses, they were often finished in faux marble rather than pale paint, the better to hide the soil line from dirty mops, which is why they're still called 'mop boards' in England. The last time I was at The White House, the baseboards in the Blue Room were painted in imitation of yellow Sienna marble. In other words, when it comes to painting doors, whatever you decide do to, you'll have plenty of historic precedent behind you. Situations where it's literally impossible to make a wrong choice don't come along very often in decorating, so when it does happens, you ought to take advantage of it. Regards, Magnaverde.
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Laminate floors, like all rigid flooring products, need expansion space at the walls. A floating floor, like laminate, needs a snick more than a permanent floor (like tile). The rule of thumb is the thickness of the plank (ie. 12mm thick laminate) is the same as the expansion gap at the walls. In my example, the 12mm (1/2") laminate will need 12mm of gap at the walls (1/2"). This could be too much for some quarter round. And it also depends on whether or not you have baseboards. If you do, are you going to remove them before installing the laminate? If you do not install the trim (quarter round or shoe mold...whichever you find more appealing) you will have a rather substantial gap at every vertical surface in your home. The amount of 'gunk' that will collect in that gap is going to be extensive. That's why trim was invented...to hide the gap between the wall finish and the floor finish.
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I love the colors you selected. I would paint the cabinet purple and leave the baseboards white. Then I would find a way to relate the purple and teal. If this were my space, I would paint a purple stencil on top of the teal on all four walls. It is refreshing to see your space. So many bathrooms are just a sea of white.
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We are having white shaker cabinets in our new kitchen. Kitchen is already gutted and cabinets should go in this week. I’m being asked about paint colors and I have a question about the trim color. I’m getting white trim of course and I’m pretty sure I want to have the white crown and baseboard match the cabinets right? I don’t want two competing whites or two whites that look different right? Thank you.
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palimpsest
13 years ago
One way to treat this would be to paint the baseboards in the satin or semigloss version of whatever the wall color is in each room. That way, it removes the potential conflict between wood tones at that particular junction, but the baseboard still relates directly to something else in the room (the wall color) rather than introducing a completely new color such as white.

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