Current interior flooring options

What is the best flooring for a modern house?

This does depend on the colours used in the house but two of the best options are luxury vinyl tile and engineered wood flooring. A house with these floors in will look as modern as any other.

LVT floors are the most versatile and arguably the most modern type of flooring. They are fully waterproof, slip resistant, scratch resistant and long lasting. Their waterproof design means they can be used throughout homes.

Engineered wooden floors look and feel great but they aren’t waterproof so shouldn’t be used in bathrooms and toilets. They can also last even longer than LVT which is many decades. The online flooring supplies stores are a great place to shop around as they often list hundreds of products and usually offer free samples.

What flooring is better than laminate?

When determining what floors are better than laminate it depends on what you consider important.

If the most important thing to you is a natural appearance, then considering laminate is most often designed to imitate wood, real wood flooring would be better. Modern laminate floors are great but they still don’t look or feel as good as real wood. Real wood also lasts longer.

If you want a floor that is durable and won’t get damaged by water, then LVT flooring is better than laminate. Wood effect LVT imitates real wood like laminate but is waterproof. This is why LVT is so successful.

What is considered high-end flooring?

High end floors are those at the top end of the range of quality for their type. Take engineered wooden floors for example, low end options will have a thin wear layer, lower quality material and shorter warranties. High end engineered wood floors are made from better quality wood, have a thicker wear layer and longer warranties. Oak flooring is the most widely used species for wooden floors due to it’s price, durability and appearance.

High end products cost more to make than low end products. The quality of the materials used and the cost to manufacture lower quality products is lower than higher quality versions. The more something costs to make the more it costs to buy. High end products tend to look and feel better.

Material rarity is also a factor. Rare stone for example is harder to find and extract than common stone. Less available material is more expensive than readily available material. 

What kitchen flooring adds the most value?

The only type of flooring that is confirmed to actually add value to homes is real wood flooring. Homes with real wooden floors have been found to sell faster and often for 1%-10% higher than those without wood flooring. A small percentage of homes gain even more than 10% of value.

How much value is added by wood flooring will depend on many factors such as the size of the home, location, general condition and the specific wood flooring. It’s also worth noting that while wood flooring is often used successfully in kitchens it is susceptible to water damage.

What are the disadvantages of laminate in kitchen?

The main disadvantage of laminate flooring in kitchens is that it’s not waterproof. This is something to be aware of because there are taps and pipes that can leak in kitchens. If laminate gets wet it can swell and stay that way. Laminate is not very expensive but it makes no sense to buy something for it to get ruined.

The most similar waterproof alternative flooring to laminate is LVT. Specifically click LVT flooring. Like laminate click LVT comes in rigid wood and stone effect planks or tiles. It also clicks together and floats over the subfloor like laminate. LVT has the added benefit however of having thin underlay built into the planks.

What is the easiest flooring to maintain?

The easiest type of flooring to maintain is vinyl flooring. This includes sheet vinyl, glue down vinyl tiles and click vinyl tiles. These floors are the easiest to maintain because they are waterproof and therefore easy to clean. They are also not very reactive which makes them simpler to install and maintain.

Stone and porcelain flooring is also easy to maintain for the same reason, it’s waterproof. Floors that aren’t waterproof are difficult to clean simply because you can’t really get them wet. Excess moisture will damage them. It’s difficult to clean something that you can’t get wet.  

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