Flooring ‘N Tiles

Interlocking foam flooring is a marvelously durable and safe product with an incredibly wide array of possible uses. For children’s playrooms, this soft product is easy on the feet and definitely superior for those nasty and repetitive crashes kids make onto floors all over the world. It’s their job, after all! But these interlocking foam flooring items also can come in riots of colorful and kid-pleasing sections, whether put together like some interesting puzzle that attracts the eye or simply in the simplicity of an arrangement of primary colors.

But interlocking foam flooring has many other uses of interest to a homeowner as well. Their easy cleaning and easy replacement makes it an ideal “mud room” flooring, easily washable and, if damaged, simple to replace entirely. As a flooring surface for an exercise room, it aids in sensations of quiet and warmth for walking barefoot and for softening the crashing oif weights or the irritating noises concomitant with repetitive exercise in general. It’s noise suppression equals its quality as an absorbant surface, much more resistant to damage at the surface.

These floorings install in literal minutes and are stain-resistant, fireproof, noise suppressive, lightweight and waterproof. They also come in some surprising tones and colors, some even resembling wood.

Ironically, or maybe not so much, they also make a fabulous outdoor product, once again as durable as they can be and colorful. Interlocking foam flooring systems are easy on the feet and helpful, once again, with those tendencies of children to “crash and burn” while having fun.

Porcelain stoneware floor tiles are making a huge splash all over the world as a top notch flooring. These dense tiles are nearly frost, water and acid resistant in their entirity. Owing to the density from being fired and virtually “vitrified”, they stand up to the most hideous traffic problems with ease. They also have a reasonable secure non-slip quality easily obtainable from the firing process itself. It is resistant to scratches and chemical deformations owing, once again, to its nearly utterly non porous nature. Durable to the max, porcelin stoneware floor tiles are rapidly becoming a major building option for all the best reasons.

As it relates to the more mundane residential envirnoment, again, their is much indeed to recommend it. The sheer range of colors and the ability to imprint literal works of art, if desired, make porcelin stoneware floor tiles an option with a dazzling array of possibilities. From bright red semi-glossy fllooring to a seeming terracotta, yet with crystallized forms streaking through it in an oxidized and natural etching, these snazzy tiles are pretty much the true “state of the art”.

One can do walls and floors with this material, ideal for kitchens and entries, yet perhaps even more so in a sleek sort of urban setting, with glossy tiles reflecting light and color and bringing a desired ambience of interest into a room.

Engineered bamboo flooring has made a rapid ascent in the last 10 years in terms of board feet used.  It is a hard and durable surface, very much a “composition board” typically featuring a formaldehyde and epoxy glue base and utilizing bamboo itself as the primary base.  Much of the reason for its popularity deals with its “Green” nature as an plant product with a rapid recovery time, thus able to harvest more often than almost any other tree or plant. Bamboo is actually a grass as opposed to a tree, yet it’s durability is unquestioned.  Hard and resilient, it acts as a terrific base for a composition piece of flooring. Being fast growing, self regenerating and rapidly renewable bamboo is an alternative to the world’s extremely rare and preservative treated hardwood.

Now, since it has the amount of formaldehyde it needs to bind itself for the composition process, it emits and unpleasant odor which is somewhat infamous in installation circles. This does die out over time, but it is a bit of a problem for homeowners facing a fresh floor made of engineered bamboo flooring.

Lightweight and easy to assemble depending on the engineering specifications, for the most part bamboo flooring is a mid range item in terms of durability and cost.  Actually, it may be a bit cheaper than most flooring boards.  Currently, almost all bamboo products come from China, so I would imagine oil prices for the shipping costs would almost always apply at least tangentially to the price.

Colorful floor tile can make an extreme difference in a home. Naturally, the term “colorful” can mean any number of things, so let us go ahead and remove the barriers to our biases and consider them all. Wild and bizarrely beautiful things are going on in the glass, metal and ceramic world: intense colors, veined glazes rife with outstanding and amazingly bright color, swirls and hand-painted objects of art. There truly seems to be no limit.

High technology has provided tiles and tilings with a entirely new set of images and colorful possibilities as a functioning piece of beautiful and other-worldly artwork. Imagine walls and floors comprised of segmented pictures of creek bed rocks or forest floor images. The photographic end of this creative twist alone is enough to make a head spin.

Then you arrive at even weirder chemical shapes and oxidized configurations determined by crystal formations and dollops of original artistic color. Truly, all limits are lifted. It is left to the imagination from this point on because there are nearly no limits left.

Brick paver tiles are a colorful and exciting cover for any driveway treatment. Placed on existing cement, they are grouted into place providing the same sort of sensibility as those brick veneers we see added to siding for the walls o houses and buildings everywhere. Durable, strong and colorful, brick paver tiles offer a fabulous look to the largest or even the smallest areas. They have a multitude of possible uses in a designer’s set of possibilities.

Many finished cement driveways may have these inset brick areas serving to break up the glaring color and the redundant monotony of large swaths of boring monolithic treatment. Breaking up the lines of a long and routine driveway can be a delightful use of brick paver tiles. As well, entire driveways of these warm, earth-toned tiles can produce an amazingly warm sense of welcome and of eye-pleasing complexity.

A variety of colors and styles of brick paver tiles are available, from the nearly “terracotta” simplicity of the clay-fired old fashioned Mediterranean stylings, to the adobe look so popular in the American Southwest, to the ultra modern new ceramics and hand painted and glazed brick tiles so easily adapted to paving, almost all things are possible in this marvelous application for a driveway, walkway or patio.

When you want to do your own tiling in a bathroom, living room or counter top, and even for flooring or even grander projects, here’s how to measure your room for tiling:

Go ahead and take the entire space into consideration.  It often helps to make yourself a diagram on paper with some very specific notations about where cuts will be made.  These allow for fixtures to be applied, electrical devices and plugs, switches and the rest. On the paper, notate your larger wall dimensional measurements at the outermost limits first.  On the diagram, place these numbers where they belong.

Now, any variations need to be considered.  If the room is perfectly square or rectangular, then you are basically done.  But if there are odd shapes and sizes, the best way to approach these areas is one at a time.  Any variation, such as a small boxy area, should be dealt with on its own. Segment the areas to be measured and approach each one of them individually.  In the end, the total area will be a compilation of all these factors.

Triangular or circular spaces actually require some math formulae for perfect measuring.  Just the same, one can arrive at an accurate rendition by the following:

For right triangles, make what would be a square shape by extending the area to exactly match the existing one.  In other words, let the angular line bisect the rectangle.  Then what you have is a perfect rectangle and you will need half of that. Circular is a bit more problematic.  One way to handle something circular is to literally treat it as flat.  The height is a no brainer, but measure the curving arc.  Treat it essentially like a flat surface. This, while informal and somewhat inexact, will still reveal a number that will closely resemble, at worst, what the truest number will be,