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Residential Flooring Choices

Choosing residential flooring isn’t that hard, it’s a matter of choice and a good sense of style.

With the number of choices available, it would be as you would expect daunting.  Residential flooring choices are just too many, stone flooring, brick flooring, hardwood, or even the cool and green natural cork tile flooring. One small gaffe and your going to live with that choice for the rest of your damned life, err… at least until you can get hold of another budget for remodeling.

Choosing residential flooring isn’t that hard. It’s a matter of choice plus a good sense of style, plus keeping in mind the properties you want to have or inherently have. Residential flooring has the choices of: carpet, wood, stone, and brick. Others fall into any category stated. Here are some suggested pointers for residential flooring.

Ecological Enthusiast

Are you a practitioner of Zen? Are a Tai Chi material? Then having an environmental themed residential flooring can bring you more good. I even find those Japanese homes very neat, very relaxing. Speaking of which, why not remodel it the Ecological Enthusiast’s way. Hardwood residential flooring is a way to start. These types of residential floorings are prized since they afford the easiest cleaning, but alert maintaining that is still easy. The surface of hardwood are non porous and they also don’t attract dirt. Grit and dust just skim over the surface, making vacuuming and cleaning uncomplicated. Besides, hardwoods are among the most beautiful floors.

Another fine choice is the natural cork floor. They offer plenty of benefits. Cork are water resistant. Even if placed in areas prone to much condensation and wet, they still make excellent floors; a good choice for bathrooms and wash area. Corks also have the inherent buoyancy, making it an outstanding material to cushion falls and tenderfoots. Putting it in nurseries and playrooms can really use the benefit of cork. And they are also surprisingly hypoallergenic, another reason why they are excellent for children’s room flooring.

Architectural Revival

Manors and villas are eternally enchanting. They speak of permanence, of being there for some time, witnessing the passage. That’s what brick flooring gives. Romanesque, Baroque, Victorian, and Gregorian, homes with architectural revival design complement well on brick residential flooring, another material that exudes timelessness. In fact the more aged the brick gets, the expensive they become. Bricks salvaged from old structures and then resold are quite lucrative businesses. Suffice to say, aged bricks are worth more than new ones.

Brick residential floorings are frequent in places on Europe. Especially on wine and country estates, where well endowed private villas abound, you can see especially timeless homes.

All about Natural Cork Flooring

Innate properties do make Natural cork floorings an outstanding preference in most home conditions.

While many negatively think that natural cork flooring isn’t the best flooring choice, innate properties of cork do make it an outstanding preference in meeting other situations.

For starters, corks are highly resistant to liquid penetration since its cellular molecular structure is way too tight for water molecules to pass through. And since cork is a bark extract, it naturally has a resin element that aids in resisting moisture. In fact, corks are used to plug leaks and holes on the hull of barges and carracks in event of a storm during ocean voyages where ship repairs were being done hastily at the opens seas. And of course, they do seal wine bottles better for centuries than any other element. Cork also has a non slippery surface, even with a smoothened surface. That makes natural cork flooring highly recommendable flooring for wash areas and bathrooms or any other areas that deal with volumes of water.

Since its characteristic of tight molecular structure with a bit of elasticity, corks not only prevent water from passing through but also air and that makes natural cork flooring good mufflers. And it absorbs shock rather well. So in an event when you have a noisy neighbor downstairs, try muffling some of the noise down by installing natural cork flooring.

Having a low thermal conductivity makes cork an ideal heat conductor. It remains warm even when temperature gets zero degrees and remains cool when temperature heats up. Consequently, there would be lesser utility bill since heaters won’t be burdened with so much use.

It is important to remember though that corks are natural products. They also age, like any other wood, and they get discolored over time, though some rather like the looks of an aged cork floor giving it a rustic look. Corks will be ruined under direct sunlight as the sun will generally make it brittle. Corks have tiny pockets of air, that’s why they are so supple; but they to tend to ‘burst’ especially under too heavy machinery. And though corks are naturally water resistant, cork do tend to swell as water could invade those parts that aren’t sealed, such as the edges.

Natural cork floorings have a nice feel and an appealing look. It comes with a wide range of colors, from its familiar honey tones to green, red, chocolate and black. And most natural cork floorings are treated with chemicals to further its durability, giving it a non porous skin making cleaning easier. The fact that it is used as wine stoppers should suggest cork as having hypoallergenic properties.