Home Improvement Advice

Posts Tagged ‘flooring’

Bamboo flooring is rapidly becoming the preferred choice for home renovators. In view of environmental quality, bamboo provides consumer an opportunity to improve their homes both decoratively and practically.

There are many benefits if you use bamboo flooring.Long lasting, beautiful and available in many colors, the value-added fact that bamboo can increase the worth of your home is driving many consumers towards installing it.

How to buy bamboo flooring

The biggest obstacle, and many shoppers are looking for bamboo flooring is where buy it. In many cases, there will be no dealer close by which begs the question, so how you shop for it? Online of course. The internet has been a boon in many areas of people’s lives and shopping is one of them. There are some excellent online retailers and a number, requires some due diligence. However, all the sales outlets are not equal.

When arriving at a website, you’ll need to determine:

- how long they have been in business
- their reputation, can they be contacted directly which is extremely important ( if no phone contact move on)
- whether references are available from satisfied customers
- whether they have a showroom base offline.
- can they send you samples including grain styles and colors

Read the rest of this entry »

The modern and durable and environmentally friendly alternative to hardwood is bamboo flooring. Being a grass, as opposed to wood, bamboo gives you the advantage of not only a building product (being strong and at the same time flexible), but also as a sustainable resource: wood takes approximately 15-20 years to reach maturity, while the non-harmful harvesting of bamboo has a mere 3 to 5 years. Bamboo has traditionally been the material of choice in most of Asia, and is only recently that its benefits and environmental properties have begun to be used more widely in the west.

The growth in popularity in recent years for wood flooring has increased the burden on already stretched timber resources. Read the rest of this entry »

Buying a new floor can be a frustrating and confusing process. Here’s a list of things to keep in mind before heading out to purchase your new floor.

1. Take note of the room layout.

- Draw an outline of the room or rooms. Indicate where the entrances are placed.

- Measure the room carefully and accurately with a measuring tape. Write down the width and length of a room. Remember to include closets and other areas that need the new flooring. Smaller print patterns can make the room seem a lot bigger.

- Take into account adjoining rooms and the flooring on those rooms.

- Make a note in which direction the room is facing and if there is a sliding door. Determine how much natural light enters the room. You might want to consider a laminated floor, ceramic tile or porcelain tile.

- Bring along swatches of fabrics from your furniture, curtains and wallpaper. These will help you decide on the color and style of your flooring.

2. Answer these questions to help you out in selecting the right floor for your room:

- How much foot traffic does the room get in any given day? The number of people passing or using the room would indicate the level of wear and tear the room would take. This would help you in deciding the type of flooring to get. A room with a high volume of traffic needs more durable flooring.

- What is the main function of the room? A room used mainly for leisurely activities will have less wear and tear. Delicate flooring materials can be chosen in this case.

- How many pets do you have? Pets tend to abuse the surroundings they are in, floorings maybe damage from scratching.

- How many kids do you have in the house? All the roughhousing and playing that the kids do tend to abuse the flooring. The more kids you have in the house, the more abuse your flooring will get.

- What color do you want? Remember that lighter colors make rooms seem bigger.

- How long do you want the flooring to last? We would of course like the flooring to last forever but wear and tear damages the flooring.

Eventually, it will need to be replaced or you may want to simply change the look of the room after a certain period of time.

3. How much is the flooring going to cost?

- Are the subfloor preparation part of the quoted price?

- Is the quoted price inclusive of the installation or is that a separate fee? This is a budgeting concern, you would want to know the actual amount you’re going to spend.

- Is the removal of pre-existing flooring included in the quoted price.

- Is the quoted price inclusive of the moving of all appliances and furniture in the room.

- Are all the necessary materials included in the quoted price? You wouldn’t want to find out during the installation that some materials are not included and that you still need to purchase more materials. That could be extremely annoying and frustrating.

4. Questions to ask the installers and the store:

- Are the installers independent, or are they store employees?

- Whose insurance will pay for installation errors?

- Are all of the materials recommended by the manufacturer so warranty will not be voided?

- Discuss with the salesperson the warranty information of the manufacturer. Keep a copy of the warranty.

- Discuss the maintenance procedure and keep a copy of the manual or brochure.

- Have everything documented including the diagram of the installation. Also, the amount of flooring needed in the room

- Ask who will be responsible for the removal of fixed features in the room, e.g. toilet.

- Always check the website of the store, if any, to give you an idea of the store. Take note of the affiliations to groups or other organizations.

It would be best to email the store in advance to have some questions answered before going there. It saves a lot of time.

- Have all the product information documented. The document should include the name of the manufacturer, product name, color, style and the installation procedure.

Keeping a home clean can at times be a major challenge. There is the dust to clean, furniture to clean, and the floor to vacuum. All of this can add up to hours of wasted time. But what if you could trim the time you spent cleaning your home by up to half? Think that notion is a bit farfetched? With tile flooring, it’s not. Many homeowners are quickly discovering that tile flooring is the ideal alternative to carpet floors. Tile, unlike carpet, doesn’t cling to hair, dirt, and other deposits left by family members or guests. This can make maintenance a breeze and provide you with plenty piece of mind, considering that you won’t have to worry about people coming in and out with shoes in your home. Below we will be exploring some of the additional perks tile flooring has to offer over carpet flooring.

Allergies can be a troublesome problem when one has a carpeted home. Pollutants including pollen and dust make home in carpet fibers, where they can begin to wreak havoc on your allergies. Tile doesn’t bond to pollutants like carpet does. This, in return can keep your allergies from acting up.

By going the tile route, homeowners can save a significant amount of money. Although tile might initially cost more, it will save you a significant amount of money in the long run. Tile, unlike carpeting, doesn’t require constant vacuuming or steam cleaning. On a further note, tile doesn’t need to be replaced every several years. It can last forever given that it’s properly maintained.

Although tile does have a large number of perks, it does have its disadvantages. For one, family members might be uncomfortable walking barefoot over the cold surface. This can be remedied by having a tile heating system installed. Tile also has a tendency to make stains more apparent. Thus, whenever you encounter a fresh stain, be sure to quickly clean it.

Tile is a very ideal alternative to carpet flooring. In terms of maintenance, health, and finances, tile couldn’t make any more sense.

Different kinds of flooring evoke different kinds of ambience and emotion. Flooring available today comes in a wide array of materials that could be used for any lifestyle and function. Many floors that we see now have ceased to be the floors that we see in old photographs and historic houses. The flooring can be very decorative, elegant, artsy, functional or practical that could suit to any individual’s style, taste and budget. But no material evokes as much warmth, sentiment and a sense of history as the good old-fashioned wood flooring.

Homes with natural wood flooring can be found in any town that in spite of all the advances in fashion and technology for other types of flooring material, the wood flooring has not lost its place in the hearts of many house builders.

In spite of the rise in the prices of wood and increase in other choices for flooring, wood has no substitute in creating homes that has a homey feel to it. Wooden floors, even the traditional cuts do not fail to enhance décor and personal statements of tastes.

A House builder who opts to have a floor with a more modern touch opts for the parquet in place of the quarter-sawn wood flooring popular during the past decades. The new prefinished hardwoods are excellent viable choices even for homes ranging in design from the traditional, country, ranch, Victorian to the contemporary. Color choices and materials are amazing making it adaptable to any look that an individual would want a room to have. The darker finishes are suitable for formal settings, and the lighter the shade become, the more casual feel the wood flooring evokes. Local popular choices like the Ash, Oak and Maple can be combined with varieties of Teak, Brazilian cherry and Bamboo creating a look and texture that has never been reached when wood flooring (aside from concrete) were oftentimes the only choice.

The engineered hard wood of today are designed to perform better than the traditional ones as they are cross layered on top of each other providing a durability and capacity to hold more weight that was never achieved before. Engineered hardwood flooring is not synthetic wood but is made form real hardwood. Engineered hardwood is much easier to maintain doing away with old-fashioned waxes and pastes as these are already treated with several coats of urethane and is IV cured with aluminum oxide. Engineered hard wood will only require occasional mopping with a wood cleaner to maintain its luster.

The most popular flooring options include:

- Oak as flooring is very durable. It has a tight dark grain that is very appropriate for dining rooms and places that requires more subdued and formal atmosphere.

- Ash has beautiful texture and grain uniformity.

- Pine can be found in old houses. This flooring evokes a sense of history. Pines are considered as softwood but they can be very durable and can last for hundreds of years.

- Birch. Also a soft wood with a more playful texture

- Fir is another softwood patched with decorative dark grains

- Bamboo technically is a grass but when harvested in season and treated well can be more durable than most hardwood flooring.

- The more expensive and elegant wood flooring are the walnut, cherry and teak.

Whatever the choice is, wood for flooring has a timeless quality to it that will never be easily substituted even by the most modern materials available today.