Month: September 2017

Laminate Flooring = Lasting Durability

Laminate flooring could be the perfect choice for your active lifestyle.  

Durability, good looks and value are smartly balanced so you upgrade and decorate without breaking your budget or loose quality. 

Choose Laminates to Achieve Your Decorating Goals 

Laminates are available in a broad variety of handsomely crafted designs. They provide the rugged durability at a value price. Thus you can find a long-wearing laminate style that can help accomplish your decorating ideas within your budget. 

Laminate Flooring = Lasting Durability 

The beautiful design you love today will remain the same in the years to come. 

All laminates are constructed of four layers: 

  • The wear layer is a clear layer of aluminum oxide that protects against fading, stains and surface burns. 
  • The design layer contains a photograph of the floor’s surface appearance. 
  • The core layer is a durable high-density board to protect the floor. 
  • The back layer is a stability layer that helps balance the floor. 

Thanks to layered construction, Laminate Floors will always look as good as the day it was installed. 

Original source.

How Laminated Floors are Made

Laminated floors have been around for a long time, but new improvements have added a much-needed feature: waterproofing.

This material is an ideal choice indoor use.

The material’s actual name is Direct pressure laminated.

It is manufactured by fusing four layers together at over 600 pounds of pressure per inch at temperatures of around 400 degrees Fahrenheit. These four layers function as follows:

• The bottom layer is known as the stabilizing or the backing layer, this layer provides strength and stability to the board. To make this material waterproof they have applied a resin-based coat to prevent water from penetrating into the material.

• The 2nd layer is known as the core board and its serves as the structural element supporting the weight and stresses of foot traffic. This layer is typically made of high-density fiberboard (HDF), but sometimes is made from particle board or medium-density fiberboard (MDF).

• The 3rd layer is decorative. It sits on top of the entire structure and its objective is to mimic the surface of a natural material, such as a hardwood veneer or lately any type of tile or other flooring materials that the manufacturer wants to resemble.

• The 4th layer is a resin-based coating designed to resist abrasion and typically made up of several coats of melamine or aluminum oxide (2nd only to diamonds in hardness) which protects the floor from stains, fading, wear and tear. This is the magical layer that makes laminated material resistant to scratches and stains.

Hopefully this information can help you by explaining how waterproof laminated floors are made and why they can be your low price, ideal solution, for your next flooring project.

Original source.

Having THIS flooring inside your home can add THOUSANDS to your property’s value

ADDING value to your home can help when it comes to selling it, and having a certain type of flooring inside your property can do just that.

Installing new flooring across your home can increase your house’s worth, depending on what material you use. 

Out of vinyl, carpet and wood flooring, which can add the most value to your property?

Discount Flooring Depot suggests the types of floor you should avoid, and which one you should invest in to up your property’s price. 

The retailer suggests that low quality vinyls and laminates will drag your value down, and it seems most homes are leaning towards wooden floors rather than carpeted floors. The best floor to invest in is a wooden floor – which is better than carpet – as it provides “extra equity” in your home. 

Plus, a high quality floor will last for much longer than a carpet, giving you life time value, as well as increasing house worth. 

Hardwood flooring is ideal, as it’s a luxury that many people associate with money and class. 

But if real wood flooring is out of your price range, you can get high quality laminates. 

Top of the range laminate floors have realist V-Grooves to mimic the feel and appearance of a real board, and they have a wealth of grain variation and knots throughout, just as you’d expect from real wood. 

When it comes to bathrooms or kitchens, hard wood flooring generally doesn’t go – but you don’t have to settle for vinyl. 

You can get water resistant laminate, and it’s not that expensive. 

Discount Flooring Depot’s Hydro Guard Range or laminate floors look like real wood, but without the problems that mixing real wood in a wet environment will often bring.The retailer says spending around £400 to £600 could increase your home’s value by £1,300. 

The colour of your front door can also have a big impact on your home’s sale. So what shades should you go for, and which should you avoid? 

Research carried out by Westbury Windows and Joinery’s found that white was the most popular colour for wood front doors or entrance doors in the UK. 

Natural stained and/or varnished finishes were the second most popular choice with black in third place. 

Original source 

How to Refinish Hardwood Floors

​Renew a wood floor in half the time and at half the expense of sanding. The secret is to screen the old finish. Read on to see if screening will work for your floor.

Sanding vs. screening

When a wood floor loses its luster, the usual solution is to sand it down to raw wood and completely refinish it. But often, that’s the wrong solution. Refinishing hardwood floors is the right solution.

All wood floors are protected by a clear coating that eventually becomes scratched, scuffed and dull. Refinishing hardwood floors can help you get rid of those unsightly scratches and marks. But as long as the damage is shallow—in the coating and not in the wood itself—you can renew the floor by adding a new coat of polyurethane right over the old finish.

This article will show you how to do just that. As with any wood-finishing project, 90 percent of this job is preparation. You have to thoroughly clean the floor, touch up any deep scratches and roughen the existing finish with sanding screens so the new finish will adhere well. Expect to spend at least one full day on this prep work. The recoating itself usually takes less than an hour.

Recoating takes a lot less time, skill and money than full-scale sanding and refinishing. And although roughing up the existing finish creates plenty of dust, it’s still much less messy than sanding down to bare wood. There’s another advantage: Every time you sand a floor down to bare wood, you remove some of the wood. A solid wood floor can be sanded several times before that’s a problem. But laminated floors (glue-down or floating floors) have only a thin layer of good-looking wood veneer over a plywood-like base. The veneer can be sanded once or twice—after that, sanding will expose the plywood core beneath.

Where recoating won’t work

The type of flooring you have doesn’t matter. Recoating works on solid wood, laminated wood and parquet floors alike. But a new coat of polyurethane may not stick to your existing finish.

If your floor’s finish was applied before the 1970s, it’s probably wax, old-fashioned varnish or shellac. No new finish will stick to a wax finish or any other finish that’s ever had wax applied to it. Polyurethane might adhere to an old, unwaxed varnish or shellac finish. But these finishes do wear out, and since they’re probably more than 30 years old, it’s best to sand them off and start over.

In fact, if you have an old finish from the days before polyurethane, your only alternative to sanding is wax. If the floor is in fair condition, wax can restore the shine. A wood flooring dealer can recommend a suitable product. Wax is easy to use, but not very durable. You’ll probably have to rewax every six months or so.

Even if the existing finish is polyurethane, good adhesion isn’t a sure thing. Residue from all kinds of household chemicals, such as furniture polish, glass cleaner, insecticide and wallpaper paste, can interfere with adhesion. Since you can’t know for certain all the potions that have landed on your floor, you must test for adhesion before you recoat your floor.

Original source

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Waterproof Plastic Laminate Flooring: Often Discussed, Rarely Seen

Laminate flooring, due to its large quantity of wood content, is acceptable but not ideal for environments with high moisture, such as bathrooms or basements. Even “laminate-friendly” rooms such as kitchens can have sub-zones that are unfriendly to laminate flooring: in front and under the dishwasher, sink, and refrigerator.

A type of laminate flooring called waterproof laminate, made entirely of plastic, allows you to install this product in such places.

While this product truly is water-proof, it has significant limitations that may encourage you to seek other types of flooring.

Laminate’s Solution for Dealing With Water: Avoid It Altogether

One solution has been to ask homeowners not to install the product in moist places, such as basements or even children’s bathrooms.

Slightly more effective solutions have been to develop tighter seams between the boards and to introduce more melamine resins in the fiberboard mix.

But none of that matters when your dishwasher overflows. This is the reason behind the “topical spills” clause in most laminate flooring warranties.

A typical industry warranty (Armstrong) notes that its laminates are covered under warranty and “[w]ill resist topical water damage, meaning that planks or tiles will not swell, delaminate or peak at the seams due to topical spills, provided that the liquid is wiped up and the floor is allowed to dry.”

Topical spills means a dropped glass of water, not an overflowing clothes washer. Even though topical does not mean “top,” it could: all spills which remain on the plasticized wear layer, with perfectly seamed boards, and with 100% silicone caulk added in problem areas (around bathtubs), should remain free of damage.

What Happens to the Fiberboard Core?

The problem is not with the top layer, but with the core. Laminate flooring’s core is little more than a dense type of fiberboard. If you’ve ever seen a sheet of particle board get rained on, you’ll know how it bubbles up and crumbles like a wet soda cracker.

One little-known aspect of this moisture-and-laminate issue is that the moisture problem actually starts in the factory, not in the home. Flooring manufacturers have found that high moisture content in the fiberboard particles in the factory can result in poor adhesion of the top melamine wear layer.

Waterproof Laminate Brands

Today, Parcolys NV, a Belgian company that is the parent of Aqua-Step, is the main manufacturer of waterproof laminate flooring. With 23 woods and 3 stones, Aqua-Step does not have the wide range of styles homeowners might expect from the non-waterproof market.

But the good thing is that Aqua-Step is truly 100% waterproof–no need to lay down a moisture barrier. Planks join by way of a click-and-lock method. Conventional laminate needs expansion joints to allow for the product to expand and contract according to room humidity. Aqua-Step absorbs no water at all, so no need for expansion joints.

Dumaplast Dumafloor is another one, also from Belgium. Dumafloor has been in production since 2007.

Expansion Profiles Unnecessary

One unexpected benefit of installing waterproof laminate is that it does not require expansion profiles. These are intermittent gaps that are imposed on a large field of conventional laminate flooring to allow for natural expansion and contraction of the flooring. Waterproof laminate is 100% unaffected by moisture, thus it needs no expansion profiles.

Luxury Vinyl Flooring as an Alternative

Most of the waterproof laminate market has been siphoned off by an upstart called luxury vinyl flooring (LVF).

LVF is thicker than ordinary vinyl flooring; has better embossing (texture); and looks more like real stone or wood.

LVF manufacturers have been pumping out tons of exciting wood species and stones, such as teak, bamboo, travertine, and bamboo.

It is 100% waterproof, too. You can drop LVF in a tub of water for weeks and it will come out having absorbed no water.

One downside of LVF is that it is not as thick as waterproof laminate. Aqua-Step clocks in at 8 mm; for LVFs, 8 mm would be considered very thick and very expensive. Average thickness for LVF runs around 3-5 mm.

Is Mannington ICORE Indicative of the Waterproof Laminate Market?

In 2003, Mannington Mills patented a new type of waterproof laminate that bypassed many of those previous solutions. Their product, dubbed ICORE, had some of these features:

Thermoplastic Core, Not Fiberboard – The key aspect is that ICORE did away with the fiberboard and replaced it with a “plastic” core made of PVC. As you can imagine, PVC (which is also used for water pipes) is quite waterproof.

Print Layer and Overlay – This is just like conventional laminate flooring. Separate layers are required for better print adhesion, rather than printing straight onto the thermoplastic core.

Honeycombed “Cells” Inside – “Foot feel” is important with laminate flooring, because it is so thin. Walking on laminate flooring can be difficult because it has little “give.” With waterproof laminate such as ICORE, interior channels or cells made for a springier feel.

Then, Mannington pulled the plug on iCORE, no reason given but presumably due to poor sales.

Original Source By Lee Wallender