When we moved into our current home, the kitchen was white, white, white! The walls and ceiling were hospital white, the floor was white tile (with a few tiny grey lines in it), the appliances were beige, the cabinets were beige, and to top things off there was a huge fluorescent light right in the middle of the ceiling. If you woke up in the middle of the night for a drink of water and you turned on the light, you would risk blinding yourself permanently. (haha)
But seriously, out of all the white things in the kitchen, the floor was the most annoying. It looked dirty pretty much every single day. We had to wash the floor at least every 2 days or else it looked horrible. Everything showed on it; dirt, crumbs, hair, spills. We did have 2 kids at the time so we used our kitchen a lot, but this was verging on ridiculous.
The first thing to go was the white walls. When we moved in, the kitchen wasn’t the only thing we needed to paint. The living room, bathroom and one bedroom were a light hospital pastel green. It is very hard to describe how ugly the color was. So we painted the living room, kitchen, hallways, bathroom and one bedroom.
We ended up living with the white floor for about 2 years. By then we’d had more than enough. The white tiles had to go. And we knew the most important feature we were looking for – tiles that would hide dirt! No solid colors, no white! Please let us go longer than a few days without having to get out the mop!!
We looked at a lot of tile. We were lucky in one respect; the style of the day was of rustic looking stone-like tiles. The ones we chose were stone-like almost concrete colors of grey, brown, beige and blue-grey. The surface was bumpy and the grout we chose was a dark grey to stand out a bit from the tile.
We chose well because the floor hides the dirt so well, we can go for weeks without washing!! It hides the dirt almost too well. Sometimes I have to think when the last time I washed the floor was. The new floor made such a big difference to my sanity.
So if you are looking for flooring options that subtly blends in with household dirt, look for the following things:
-multiple colors
-texture
-randomness of pattern (or no pattern)
-medium shades of color
-dark shade of grout
Your mental well being will thank you and then you can choose when you want to wash the floor instead of your floor demanding way too much attention from you.