Flipping French Floors #2 – floor envy

I have had floor envy for a while now.

Investigations have not turned up any charming original tiled floors in the French house which we could have lovingly restored. There is a small area of tomettes on the first floor that we will keep, but that’s it.

I yearn to replicate one of these beautiful floors in a mix of pale, small tiles  in natural colours such as these found on maisoncreative.com

 

Tiled v wood floors? both look authentic and appropriate but in some ways I am glad that our main living/dining/cooking/sleeping  areas are on the first & second floors and have wood floors, which I love and like to walk on barefoot. Crucially, wooden floors are warm too & with the odd rug are perfectly fine in winter.

The cave presents a different dilemna. We have “lived with it” for a few years and mulled over whether to extend the central heating down there and/or connect up a vintage log burner but practicality, economy & comfort have won out. Tiles are cold, be warned. Great in summer, no bloody fun in winter!!!

We will install the excellent  Warmup ( http://www.warmup.co.uk/ ) under floor electric wire system that we put into our ground floor shower room and breakfast room in UK in our mid-century house.Readily available in France too.

It was efficient and inexpensive to run & hopefully we can, as we did in UK, lay it ourselves, with our electrician testing and connecting it finally. Over that I have finally found the right tiles, which we will buy next trip in case these get discontinued ( story of my life on this damn project!) The small travertine tiles I have found in Tridome are actually wall tiles but are thick and tough and will do the job beautifully. In shades of pale terracotta, pearly off-grey, light stone and creamy white the look will replicate those in this photo -Right-  found on:-

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/overseas-property/in-France.html