Homeowners today are looking for more fashionable choices in their flooring selections. No other floor covering category offers the selection, styling, and ease of maintenance as a vinyl floor! Thanks to some great advancements in styling and technology vinyl floors have been changed forever. Vinyl flooring can now realistically mimic the look and textures of real ceramic, stone and wood grain patterns. These amazing replicas have such incredible realism it is difficult for most people to tell whether it's the real thing or not.

Vinyl composition tiles or VCT, has all the advantages of sheet vinyl, is available in a wide array of colors and can look good anywhere. Spare tiles can be kept on hand to repair worn areas. The tile format opens up unlimited possibilities for creating your own unique patterns.

To thoroughly understand the differences between the newer vinyl floors available and the other older vinyl floor types, we have broken it down into several smaller steps. Once you have paged through the various vinyl pages you will have a better understanding of how these new generation vinyls have changed forever the way we perceive a vinyl floor.

For information about a specific product, or for information about installing a specific floor you should always refer to the manufacturer's written documents. Use the information found here as a basic guide to help you better understand how to choose the best floor for your specific needs.

Homeowners are offered two types of residential sheet vinyl flooring. The older construction type is called inlaid construction and the newer, more common construction type is called rotogravure construction.

The inlaid process uses solid colored vinyl chips that are laid on top of a carrier sheet and then bonded together with heat and pressure. The inlaid process has been around for years and generally results in geometric type patterns and designs. Residential inlaid floors have a clear wearlayer placed over the top of the chips to make the floor's finish easier to maintain. It is important to note that you are not walking directly on the inlaid chips, instead you are walking on the clear wearlayer that was placed on top of the chips. The appearance of your inlaid floor is dependent on how long the clear finish will last.
The rotogravure printing process is the most commonly used method for making residential vinyl floors and offers unlimited possibilities in pattern and design. This involves a print cylinder that spins around while the vinyl's core layer (called the gel coat) passes underneath. The cylinder systematically prints various colored ink dyes to create the pattern. After the print dyes are set a clear wearlayer is applied to the surface. Like the inlaid the appearance retention of a rotogravure floor is dependent on the durability of the clear wearlayer.

The wearlayer is critical to the performance of a vinyl floor. The thickness of the wearlayer varies with each resilient 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. So a 10 mil wearlayer would be comparable in thickness to about 10 pages in your telephone book. Generally the more expensive vinyl floors have thicker wearlayers. Your expectations for how long your vinyl floor will look new and fresh are based on the wearlayer's performance. To help you understand wearlayer construction we need to define what the performance characteristics are we are looking for in a vinyl floor. These performance characteristics can be broken into several key areas:

• Easy to clean
• Stays looking like-new
• Resists staining from normal household products
• Doesn't show scratches easily
• Easy to cleanup spills

The easy to clean relates to how tough it is to remove soiling and other marks from a floor's surface. When a floor begins to look old and drabby it is usually caused by hundreds of fine hair-line scratches in the wearlayer. The fine scratches come from dirt, grit, and sand laying on the wearlayer's surface. Another problem low-end floors and older vinyl floors have is staining of the wearlayer, which can happen from asphalt driveway sealers, Kool-Aid, plant food, marking pens, etc...

The new generation vinyls have all the ingredients to resist showing wear and staining far better than any other vinyl floor made today.

Atlanta Flooring Design Centers specialize in selling and installing the broadest selection of vinyl, also known as resilient, products. We sell and install the finest vinyl products offered by Armstrong, Congoleum, Mannington, Tarkett, and others. Vinyl is a very stable product which has some natural advantages over other types of floor covering for the kitchen and the bathrooms. There are certain things that vinyl does very well: it is easy to maintain and enables the consumer to have one sheet of product installed over the entire surface.

Rubber Floors Rubber floors have much to recommend them. Today they can be purchased in a wide array of great, clear colors. Stud rubber flooring is available in sheet or tile form. It is extremely durable, virtually indestructible, quiet and warm to walk on and resists dents and stains. The waterproof surface has an anti-slip finish. It is a relatively a more expensive flooring choice and must be installed by an experienced installer for maximum performance.