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Vinyl Guide

Like broadloom carpet, sheet vinyl or resilient flooring offers a broad spectrum of style and color, and new technologies can replicate textures found in natural materials, such as stone or wood, or even woven flooring, such as sisal. Vinyl is more forgiving underfoot than other hard surfaces, is wear and stain resistant and easy to clean, and it is the preferred flooring wherever moisture is present. In addition to sheets, vinyl flooring comes in easy-to-install tiles.

How to choose
Obviously, color and pattern will influence your vinyl flooring choice, but you should note that there are two types of vinyl flooring: inlaid and printed.

Inlaid: Vinyl imbeds color granules into the vinyl sheet for a richer finish. Colors are an integral part of the floor.
Printed: Vinyl is produced much like a magazine page. Colored inks are printed onto the flooring sheets.

Also, you may want to examine the backing of your vinyl floor. It provides additional moisture and mildew resistance. Backing also provides the resilience that vinyl is noted for and determines the type of adhesive required for installation. In general, a thicker floor is a better floor.

Options
The wearlayer, or surface coating, is critical to the performance of a vinyl floor. The thickness of the wearlayer varies with each manufacturer's collection, or series and is generally measured in mils (the thickness of a mil is about the same as a page in your telephone book). There are three surface coatings, which resist dirt, stains and scuff marks:

• Vinyl No-Wax is good for areas with light traffic and minimal exposure to dirt.
• Urethane is good for areas with normal to heavy traffic. Urethane also resists scuff marks, scratches from sliding chairs and cleans up easily.
• Enhanced Urethane is considered the highest quality surface coating. Enhanced urethane holds up to the heaviest traffic, offers the greatest stain and scratch resistance and maintains its original luster longer than other coatings.
• Fiber glass backed floors are the latest addition to sheet vinyl. Some of the advantages of fiber floors are that they can be loose laid (no need for adhesives) and they are very easy to maintain.

Care and maintenance
No-wax surfaces and easy cleanup are also advantages of vinyl flooring. Regular sweeping and occasional damp mopping are all you need to keep your floor looking bright and new. Spills are no problem, simply wipe them away with a damp cloth. (A deeply textured pattern may be harder to clean.)

What is Linoleum?
The term linoleum is often used incorrectly to describe any sheet flooring. Linoleum was actually invented in England in 1863 by Frederick Walton who coined the name from the Latin linum, which means flax, and oleum, which means oil. It is manufactured by oxidizing linseed oil to form a thick mixture called linoleum cement. The cement is cooled and mixed with pine resin, and wood flour to form sheets on a jute backing.

Your grandmother's linoleum floor was probably real linoleum - it was hard to maintain but offered endless design possibilities.

Today linoleum has enjoyed a resurgence due to the fact that it is a natural, renewable product, but it still can be difficult to maintain.

Luxury Vinyl Tile
Luxury vinyl tile is a real winner. It combines the ease of maintenance of vinyl with the performance characteristics of much tougher floors. Available from several leading manufacturers, LVT is one of the most fashion forward flooring options available on the market today.

Made from a mix of vinyl and fillers like limestone, LVT offers tremendous dimensional stability and often feels more like a ceramic tile or even a laminate plank than vinyl.