Marmoleum Basement Flooring, a good choice?

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Is Linoleum by Marmoleum Basement Flooring a good choice?

Yes, original Forbo Linoleum is certainly a great choice for a basement floor. Marmoleum basement flooring borderThe thing that people really like about marmoleum basement flooring, and especially the one and only original Marmoleum resilient flooring is the warmth. Don’t misunderstand that the floor is actually warmer than other floors at all. It just feels that way. It’s just the way our bodies react that putting your feet on ceramic tile or linoleum would have the linoleum feel warmer.

 

Pick the Colors of your Marmoleum Basement Flooring & Furnishings First! For basements, the flooring is the single most significant design element. Since the rooms are usually large and open and they have more floor space than any other room in the home that color can dominate a design. When you pick the wrong color for a basement floor it is usually tragic since it is such a big investment. For that reason, it is a great and wise choice to pick the floor and furnishings in tandem before settling on paint colors or accessories, since they can always be adjusted.

People are always worried about moisture and flooding in the basement and with good reason. While a premium floating floor can be an easy and reasonably priced option it is not cheap. Fortunately, when a proper moisture test is performed you can rest easy. Many installers still use the old fashioned and reasonably reliable calcium chloride method. A newer method uses a meter that is held against the floor with modest reliability. Lastly is the method of drilling holes and inserting electronic probes that register in percentages or temperature. Rapid RH is one of the better methods out there today.

Once you know whether there is significant moisture in a slab that may exceed recommendations for your particular product, you can pick a way to address it. In many cases simply rolling out a padding / vapor barrier may do the trick. Often times it is suggested to cut the piece larger than the room and allow it to run up the wall to be covered by the base trim. This is a good practice to do this. The other options may be to paint on a moisture limiting product which is like painting on a latex rubber coating. The last, most expensive and most chemically undesirable would be to trowel out an epoxy coating. This would typically be used when someone absolutely has to have resilient sheet or tile. Hazardous to breathe in and hard to work with, epoxy moisture mitigation coatings must be skim coated over with a cementious mix before installing the finished floor.

Once all the details are taken care of, Marmoleum basement flooring can be a great choice.

Battleship Linoleum: Where Did It Go?

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Battleship Linoleum. Why did it go out of style?

Battleship Linoleum seems to be the term that a lot of the empty-nesters use to describe the flooring they grew up with. Why did the stuff go out of production and why did it become hard to find? There really are three reasons…

1. Plastics… everyone of a certain age remembersBattleship Linoleum Plastics “The Graduate” where Dustin Hoffman’s character is given the tip of a lifetime to go into the plastics industry. Plastics certainly made a lot of companies and a lot more people rich by bringing cheaper imitation products to the marketplace. Unfortunately Marmoleum was one of them. All the other linoleum companies went under or practically died eventually because of good old, cheaper, faster American vinyl plastic.

2. Lasts too long… unfortunately back in the fifties and sixties with the amazing boom in prosperity, Americans wanted to upgrade everything they owned to the newest and most advanced luxury option. Many were still standing on linoleum floors from the 1920’s and 1930’s and were just plain sick of it. In a nutshell, linoleum simply lasted too long for many people’s tastes.

3. Complex installation… with the advent of click together lino there is a resurgence of natural flooring being installed. Too few trained installers in the marketplace means that prices go up with supply and demand and many folks are priced out of the market when they get a quote for sheet goods. Tile installations and click are a good compromise when the budget is limited.

4. Battleship linoleum… the navies of the world Battleship Linoleumalso have a desire to be fashionable. Sadly, that often means that toxic and hazardous epoxy paints are often being used in place of naturally durable and beautiful battleship linoleum. Happily, the armies of the world are still specifying old fashioned lino roll goods for their barracks and we already know that schools and hospitals are crazy about the stuff because it holds up.

 

 

Healthy Flooring Alternatives

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Healthy flooring alternatives? Why do I even care about that?

A lack of healthy flooring alternatives might be a significant factor in the number of people that are complaining these days about allergies and asthma. That can be quite astounding if you start to pay attention to this problem that is on the verge of epidemic. What might be the most amazing is that people are typically spending more time and money suffering or taking medicine that compounds the problems than trying to take the bull by the horns, especially when it comes to kids. How many folks rush their children straight to the specialist rather than let things run their course naturally. The doctors are all too quick to provide inhalers, steroids and antihistamines to settle health problems that can generally be attributed to carpet and rugs as well as lots of other things hiding in our homes.

Consider the following:

Sources of Asthma, Allergy & Runny Nose and some alternatives:

  1. Cleaning & Disinfecting Products (use vinegar, borax, baking soda and bleach occasionally)
  2. Paints, Stains & Coatings (find non toxic solutions and don’t confuse Zero VOC with Non Toxic)
  3. Foams & Paddings (avoid urethane, styrene and all other foams and spongy synthetics using jute and natural fibers instead)
  4. Synthetic Chemicals (keep your loved ones away from epoxy, urethane and smelly solvents)
  5. Food-Based Toxins (pesticide and fertilizer sludge residues are toxic…. grow your own or buy organic)
  6. Airborne Dusts & Toxins (use hepa and negative ionization to filter the airborne dusts from coal burning and cars that is in the air)
  7. Carpet, Flooring & Adhesives (glues, vinyls, synthetic rubber, foams, plastic yarns…why not use natural & healthy flooring alternatives if possible)

Generally, much of what we are being exposed to is plastic or a derivative of plastic or petroleum and our bodies are simply not equipped to combat the huge volume of these volatile chemicals being thrown at us. A good resource for understanding some of this is found here at this site with information from the EPA; Indoor Air Quality or see their video on Indoor Air Quality below. Ultimately it will be up to the manufacturers to make healthy flooring alternatives since the government and our legislators can not even begin to control this problem.

 

Don’t think for a second that your government or anyone for that matter except your mother might know what is best for you. In fact, it has been proposed that most men do not have the sensitivity to odor to protect themselves and their families from chronic or even acute chemical hazards. If you think about it, most men live shorter live and most tradesmen are men. This is no coincidence. There is a theory that men, having done all the smelly jobs like fighting, burying the dead and butchering animals for thousands of years have lost much of their natural sensitivity to odor or can turn it off as a coping skill. Men seem to be in charge of most building product specification and purchasing and are typically the ones who are saying “what are you worrying about” to their partners or clients.

Using healthy flooring alternatives that are bacteriostatic like linoleum can prevent the growth of many harmful bacteria and that is the reason it is used in hospitals and schools. Additionally, linoleum after it’s natural oils have cured in the factory has virtually none of the off-gassing from composite flooring and other products that require the use of solvent based adhesives. The adhesives used with linoleum flooring leaves little in the way of chemical smell to bother people after the installation.