Flooring For Beginners

Ever wondered of all the modern materials available for flooring what makes granite such a favorite. One very good reason for that is granite is amongst the hardest, most durable and thus longer lasting material available for floors. Different parts of house may have different materials for flooring but for kitchen granites is unsurpassed. Of course it’s matter of personal choice but decided by use, amount of foot traffic and overall looks. Here, we’ll try to understand the plus and minus features of this great looking, hard material that offers easy maintenance and what makes it the ideal choice for kitchen floors.

Granite floors and kitchen seem to be made for each other. Kitchen undoubtedly has the most abused floor in the whole of household. Over and above the foot traffic that it bears like other floors in the house, it is subjected to spills of different kinds and therefore needs more frequent cleaning. Apart from spillages, it bears the brunt of all fallen items that often slip from one’s hand while working there. Perhaps no other floor than granite can bear all that and it becomes the obvious choice for kitchen floor. Moreover, natural granite being available in many patterns and styles add to the looks of any kitchen.

Granite is amongst the hardest materials, offers utmost durability and thus suitability for kitchen floors. Another factor that favors its use in the kitchen is its inherent resilient to stains and capacity to bear acids and chemicals. It has characteristic resistance to oils, grease, fat, tea, coffee or boiling water, and cold fizzy sugary drinks and all the materials that are frequently used in the kitchen. It is equipped to facing bombardments of falling cutlery, crockery and glassware and all that it demands is quick removal of rubble so generated and it continues to look fresh and shining.

Cleaning and maintenance of granite floor doesn’t demand much. Daily sweeping and mopping with warm water would leave it clean and unharmed. Care should be taken for quick cleaning of any spillage or rubble created by broken crockery or jar. To continue to have shining floor, once a week it should be cleaned with soapstone proceeded by a mop rinsed with water.

Despite all its advantages, granite has one limitation of getting scratched by quartz. The sand that may enter your house thru shoes is a good carrier of quartz. So, heavy foot traffic that kitchen faces causes the damage when small particles of sand get deposited on its surface that develops minute scratches, which if left untreated for long make the floor acquire dull looks. Restoration of scratched dull floor is an expensive process that may even lead to changing of its original color. Therefore, it’s better to take the preventive measure of sweeping and mopping the floor everyday. This measure helps retaining the original color and shine of granite.

So, but for one disadvantage that can certainly be taken care of without much expense and labor, granite is the best option for kitchen floor due its excellent looks, durability, toughness and resistant to stains coupled with easy maintenance.

Of the many materials available for flooring, limestone is one, and there are good reasons for patronizing it. For centuries this material has been in use. That is one reason that makes this material look beautiful on floors of buildings with old styled rooms housing wooden furniture of equally old style and design. People generally underestimate its ruggedness. As a matter of fact it is tougher than many other flooring materials. Though it is not hard like marble, and prone to wear and tear, it lasts for many years provided that it is treated and sealed properly at the outset. Let’s have a look at its positive and negative characteristics for being used as a flooring material.

Some good reasons for patronizing limestone as flooring material include its rugged nature and good looks. It perfectly jells with the country environment and compliments an old styled living area like a lounge or study room decorated with old wood furniture. No material better compliments those antiquated solid wood cabinets and bookshelves made from oak and pine. The rustic looks of limestone floor very harmoniously hold pieces of old rich furniture comprising of chairs and tables while adding to aesthetics of such a palace like place. This solid material provides a very cool touch to feet with that element of safety at the back of your mind.

The degree of hardness offered by limestone is much less than that of marble. That makes it unsuitable for areas that have higher level of activities or more foot traffic like say kitchens. It’s also susceptible to stains and some of the acids may badly damage its surface. It needs better maintenance and more frequent cleaning than marble. Moreover, it’s quite sensitive to sand particles that enter households thru soles of shoes and gets scratched rather easily. All these features of this stone discourage its being employed in kitchens, bathrooms or other such high traffic bearing rooms.

By way of maintenance, a limestone floor demands more than just regular sweeping and mopping. It needs to be cleaned by plain warm water, preferably warm water with a small, prescribed quantity of a pH neutral propriety floor-cleaning agent specially devised for being used on marble and limestone floors. Cleaning with strong acidic cleaning agents or those with bleaching powder will harm its looks and could stain or discolor the stone. Another important measure for its maintenance includes periodic and professional application of sealant after every few years, as being porous in nature it attracts dampness that goes to spoil its looks in the long run.

As one can understand that limestone needs better care thru proper and regular maintenance to prevent it from getting spoiled and stained. Nevertheless, it’s a wonderful medium for floors of an older style home with rustic setting. It surely makes a charming setting in such houses by adding to their overall appearance and décor.

The use of bamboo as an option for ‘green’ flooring is already much talked about. But, we do have other options too. Reclaimed hardwood flooring is another equally good, if not a better, ‘ green’ alternative for flooring. Reclaimed flooring achieves the same goal of preserving the environments as is realized by recycling of old paper, plastic and metals.

Reclaimed flooring means flooring that has been prepared from wood salvaged from old buildings, factories and warehouses etc. For long the buildings have been razed to ground and leveled to make way for new structures and the materials used for construction of old buildings were sent to landfills. And, one of these materials has been wood. Agreed, that the circumstances demand demolishing old buildings but why not salvage materials, particularly natural material like wood and reuse the same. Reclaimed flooring just does the same, enabling use of wood, so salvaged from old buildings, as an excellent flooring material for the present day new buildings.

Old buildings of the 188’s or 1900’s not only have exceptional architecture, but also employed amazing materials for their construction. It’s difficult to imagine using heavy heart pine beams of 12″ thickness and 16″ or more width and many feet long because we don’t get to see such trees these days, simply because we don’t give the needed time of about a hundred years for wood to mature. The earlier generations had virgin forests do depend upon for that kind and size of wood. Even floors were made from that quality of wood. It’s not difficult to imagine the strength of such wood that could support so heavy structures without failing for hundreds of years. This wood has had very fine grain structure. Different varieties of wood were used for construction proposes of that time. One often comes across the use of oak, both, red and white, heart pine hickory and now almost extinct chestnut in those buildings. Can we let go such wood to landfills or just burn it? It must be reused and fortunately means are available for doing the needful.

Here, let’s have a look at the process of reclaiming wood from the condemned material that would have otherwise been sent or landfill or burning. The used material is sent for remanufacturing. As a first step, it is examined for removal of nails, nuts and bolts or other such material that might have been used years ago at the time of construction of the building. The heavy big beams are then re-sawn into boards needed for making of floors. Just imagine that an old 20 feet long beam 12 inches thick and s16” inches wide gives flooring material worth over 400 square feet! Once the beam has been re-sawn into planks, it may be ripped to have a reduced width. For example a beam of 12”X16” can be cut to get 16 boards, each 12” wide and 7/8” thick. Each board of 12” is then cut into two to get 32 boards, each 6” wide. As wood has some natural element of water in it, the boards are treated in a kiln to get rid of moisture, which causes wood to bend or warp, thus making it unfit for use. The process is known as kiln drying. In simple words in involves heating of wood in controlled atmosphere so that all the retained water is evaporated without causing any harm to wood. Finally, the treated boards are taken to special purpose machine called matcher where it is given tongue-and-grove arrangement that enables two planks to fit into each other.

Having gone thru all the processes described above, the wood that was intended for destruction is shaped for being installed as a fresh and new flooring material. This flooring has exceptionally good quality. These days it may not be possible to get wood in such color and characteristics. You get excellent wood without causing any harm to environments. While you help to keep the world “green”, you get unique wood, one of its kinds that are not available anywhere in the rest of the world. There is another interesting part. It is not uncommon for the sellers of such wood to tell you some history of the wood you are buying. You may know the exact building from where this wood was removed for reprocessing and if you are among the lucky ones, you may get a photograph of the old building. So, you are buying a part of history, not just flooring!

It’s about time that we all started giving second thoughts to killing tress for making our floors. If you insist on using wood as a flooring material, explore the possibility of using reclaimed wood.

Exploiting natural stone as a flooring material is not a novel idea. Prehistoric buildings are all found with carefully laid stone slabs that have continued to provide stable floors for innumerable number of years. Of course, we have a wider choice these days because of technically developed stone tiles.

You get many textures and colors for stone flooring. It comes with its built-in durability and is found suitable for many different conditions. While considering a flooring material you should bear in mind that the only flooring material that really improves with passing time is stone. It lasts forever. Floors of prehistoric buildings that still look beautiful testify that.

There are not many options of flooring materials that can beat hardwearing characteristics of natural stone. Its continued use gives it a very distinctive finish that can’t be acquired by any technical process. It is easy to clean and maintain. It looks stylish and surpasses the looks of any modern man-made stone developed for flooring.

Primarily there are three types of rocks from which stone can be derived for the purpose of flooring.  These are sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic. The examples of sedimentary rock are Travertine and limestone.  Granite is igneous rock, whereas slate and marble are examples of metamorphic rock.

Technology has facilitated to make replicas of natural stones. Reconstituting stones makes tiles. Since long manufactures have been trying to make tiles that would look like beautiful natural stones. Though their efforts have not failed completely with some of the products being very good, they continue to be replicas and are not real stones.

It’s not difficult to know the difference between the two. Machine made tiles as a result of a recent technological developments are new, whereas real stones, in certain cases might have taken 300 million years for its making. Formation of natural rocks is a slow phenomenon that takes its own time but the resultant material that we derive from rocks is of immense beauty. There is none denying the fact that natural stone flooring can’t be duplicated and thus has no competitor.

The roughness that is naturally associated with natural stones used for flooring can be treated to get an even and smooth finish by polishing it. As a result, you get shining pieces of natural stones for flooring. Well, if you don’t like it to shine, it can be treated to have matt finish, enabling its texture to stand out. It may be dark or black or even light colored, or in fact anything in between.

Floors made from natural stone are almost maintenance-free. Once it has been sealed properly, the cleaning is easy. A good sealant is one that doesn’t cause any change in its color, and prevents its staining, ultimately prolonging its life.

To the delight of its patrons, natural stone flooring lasts for many generations. You should be aware that the oldest stone floor in Britain is made of limestone that is estimated to be 7000 years old and continues to maintain its good looks. We couldn’t ask for a better proof of sustainability of natural stones!