I'm 100% with YOU! All of my floors are wood, even in the bathrooms, but I have a Cape built in 1937, and found the Douglas Fir floor under vinyl in the master bath on the second floor. I added a powder room on the first floor where the floors are oak, and I used oak in that room. The bathroom in the daylight basement has a tile floor. No Decorating Police have arrested me. :-)

The police are surely trying to find me. After living for years in white and beige rooms we painted lots of color. We love it and just don't answer the door to anyone who looks like they might be agin our tastes. Vary away m'lady.

I think having all the same finishes has more to do with builders convenience than any stead fast rule. Spec homes built because they get a better deal buying in bulk. Buying 5 gallon paint buckets in their own tried and true colors. Nothing wrong with that if it is a neutral you like. Not so much if you like variety and color. Our new to us home was all painted a beige but with pink undertones that I totally hated. I got a 5 gallon bucket of I color I loved from our previous home and my husband painted a room at a time until there wasn't enough left to complete another room. All rooms within sight of the others, living room, kitchen, dining, sunroom, office and hall will all be the same color. Our bedrooms and baths will be different whenever we get around to doing them. It's your house do whatever you want. We all have different tastes. What works for your family is what works.

My home flows from room to room, but doesn't precisely match. Kitchen floor is hardwood as is most of the rest but the bathroom floors are all tiled. And the bathroom cabs do not match the kitchen. Heck,the kitchen cabs don't match the Butler's pantry cabs. Am I getting sent to Bad Design camp? Will there be cookies?

In both the houses my parents have built, my dad's done matching cabinetry and hardware between the kitchen and bathrooms in both, but it was about doing a design well once (cabinet template and hardware selection) rather than following some rule that says everything has to be the same. In one house, the kitchen, bathrooms, and lanudry room all have identical cabinets and hardware, but the countertop stone is different.

For my house, I really want all the rooms to have distinct personalities, so I want to do flow and cohesion rather than straight-up matching. I might reuse the cabinet design from the kitchen for the bathroom vanity, but use a different stain, different hardware, and different countertop. But there's still that carry-through with the cabinet being the same design.

Style is different than personality and feel. I'd not want a craftsman bungalo kitchen and a Jetsons mid century bath. But I might love the fact that a shaker white kitchen led to a cement tile master bath, and deep navy vanity......... and see what I mean? : ) Get pro design help local to you. It's the best way to maximize your style and dollar effort.

Don't "leave the country" when you leave a room.

When I was not retired, my business existed for people like you! Husband thought one way, wife another and neither really had any idea at all!

New houses in subdivisions are built with all the walls/trim painted the same - it's quicker and easier for the builder and they discovered that the people buy-in these house liked it as well. If everyone's house was that way, it must be "right" - no "bad decorating decisions" could be made!

Well, perhaps, but the boredom of all those beige or gray walls...yikes! The interior of a house need not be the same as the exterior. One often sees 100 year old houses decorated in quite a contemporary fashion these days. And one does find antique furniture and orientals in glass houses. Doing this requires a VERY well-trained and experienced eye or the results can be pretty awful!

The rooms of a house should flow and not look like a designer show house where 10 different designers took 10 rooms and each did them in a different style/feel. Not good in a house where one actually lives! If they flow, the same general colors will appear in another room, but not necessarily used in the same way. This was a LOT easier when people decorated traditional and used lots of chintz. My own house has brown, beige, yellow, blue, green, rosy red, deep red, pink in the various rooms. The walls in the LR are covered in a buttery yellow/cream striped wallpaper. The sofa is covered in dark green velvet. The print linen at the windows has just about all the colors listed above somewhere in that print. The other chairs have pulled from these colors. The abutting DR has walls covered in dark green tone-on-tone wallpaper, and the curtains are cream chintz with green/gray/a tiny touch of azure in them. See what I mean? "Variations on a theme" is the name of the game. The entire house has cohesiveness but does not in any way "match". I have different faucet finishes in different bathrooms - they weren't all done at the same time, and I got what felt right for that bath. All my floors in the house (with the exception of 3 bathrooms) are hardwood, all stained the same medium brown. All my ceilings are white except for my sun porch which has a haint blue ceiling. My kitchen cabinets are painted Shaker; the bathrooms cabinets are "I have no idea what style" as they were here when we bought the house 34 years ago. We painted them black to make them disappear and they did! We never considered spending the money to replace them. No guest has yet commented that the first floor bath cabinet didn't match the ones in our kitchen!

I like houses that "grow" over the years. I had a different chintz and different sofa color in my LR when that yellow/white wallpaper was put up in 1991. Before that, the walls were dragged in a light coral - pretty but not good with the light in that room. So, first wall color changed after 7 years, then fabrics changed in 14 years later! It all works! But then I'm a designer and I know HOW TO MAKE IT WORK!

I am curious. What are the colors and styles that you have now?

Thank you to all for your generous opinions! I am trying to stay within the same style which is traditional Shaker cabinets and wood grained tile for flooring. My main issues are that we remodeled our guest bath appr 7 years ago. My opinion was that it was dated but my husband liked the dark tiles so we went with it. Now he seems to think we need to model our future remodel's after the guest bath, Im trying to update and lighten up our spaces. i have tried pulling in some of the main colors from the other bathroom but with lighter warm neutral tones. We are fortunate that we will have the same cabinet maker and he can keep with the Shaker style. For some reason my husband thinks we have to stay with the same stain and tile colors...I will stay with the fundamentals of the style but would love to give each room a flare of its own. I just dont think each room has to match. but I constantly second guess myself and end up caving in to what hubby wants. My hope was to get opinions from many people to try to validate my ideas . thank you for your thoughts and opinions!

ok, we have his id and this was just in a houzz artical

between one and the other a universe of design happens, put pics together in a book or in the ideabook. bound to find some common ground, have fun!

This is exactly why most every designer will tell you this is their job description unless a household of one:

Mediator, therapist, financial advisor, designer. Yes, four parts, and rarely does the fourth part happen unless one has mastered the first three. Actually, it's true in households of one as well.

When we say design is personal? Uh yeah...... it is.

I always ask myself when helping someone, and helping in this case often means finding ways to make conflicting desires work: How can we get to the very WONDERFUL compromise? (She's traditional, he's modern, or it is vice versa, she's relaxed in home keeping, he's a drill sergeant pick the conflict ) .........and it virtually never means one person gets ALL exactly as they would select on their own......it usually means they get a juxtaposition, a far better version of what would happen left to their own devices. It's hard to explain. So I will echo much of Anglophilia and say get pro help.. There is always a way to make everyone happy, and usually to make them think it was THEIR. IDEA. AS. WELL. I need ten smiley after that. I will put just one : )

Example? Look at the back end of the photo. The chinois armoire..It has been in three of their homes. I put it in the first, she adores it, he loathes it. When it got to this house? " I always hated that damn thing" My answer? Well.........bear with us babe, because without it the room will sort of die. " He LOVES this room. He got his desk, the deep moody walls. She got her richly tufted velvet sofa, though not in green but in inky navy. .....he got a leather man chair, but it is a gorgeous french feeling cigar chair with generous ottoman... on it goes...lol and the armoire stayed

I think its time to hire a designer! Thank you for your sage advice!