Interior Design Course: Week 2

Here's a recap of what I learnt in Week 2 of the Interior Design course

WEEK 2

Flooring and Lighting
Types and Applications of Floor Treatments
Types and Applications of Lighting

In the Flooring session there was a lot of talk about the different types of flooring and the pros and cons for each - we covered floorboards (my favourite), tiles and carpets. We also went into concrete floors, stone, vinyl and the old faithful cork. There are so many choices and each have good and bad qualities.

We went for a walking tour around the Home Expo centre to look at the different types of flooring. There is nothing better than being able to stand and touch and see flooring up close, compared to viewing paper samples of a product. Never commit to a product by a paper sample (says she who picked a paint colour from a computer screen!). With flooring you have to stand on it and imagine how it will work in your home with your kids, pets and furniture. You need to think about how it will wear, how often you can clean it, and how long it will last you. 

We then had an exercise of drawing and colouring in a floor using shades of colours that you see in the floor. I picked jarrah floorboards (of course!) and picked up colours of red, orange and brown.

Next we moved onto lighting and all the different types of lighting and where they should be used. The most efficient choice of bulbs for leaving lamps on all night, new types of led lighting for kitchens which take up no room and don't get hot, and using pendants in proportion so they aren't too big or small for the area.

I have pretty much sorted the lighting in my home and besides the disastrous high hanging pendant in my living room I'm pretty happy with my light choices so far. The kitchen however will need a lot of planning to get right with  proper lighting under benches for chopping and cooking. I absolutely love the dramatic bubble type chandeliers and want to build a two story house just so I can hang one in the stairwell!

The lighting homework was to cut out all the different types of lighting - General lighting, Spot lighting, Task lighting, Down lighting and Decorative lighting

I also asked about the landscaping section that was missed last week and apparently there are only notes in our files but no slides to look at because there's not enough time to cover it all. They run a separate course on landscaping that covers outdoors in more detail so I might be tempted to go to that as we have the entire front house to landscape and design, as well as a big backyard.

Week 1 you can read about here
Week 3 is all about Kitchens, Bathrooms and Laundries

[First image my own and homework floors and lighting images my own
All other images from Home Base Expo - Stairs here, Timber Floor here, Epoxy Floor here, Stone Floor here, Travertine here, Lights 1 here, Lights 2 here, Skylight here]