The floors in an apartment or a private house are perhaps the most important element in the design of premises. The floor covering sets the tone for the interior of the entire room, in its power to create a feeling of lightness in the room or to form a formal-formal style. If the flooring material is selected in compliance with all requirements, then the flooring will serve for a long time and efficiently. The main thing is to choose it taking into account the intended operation of the room. For example, natural parquet should not be laid in a room with a high level of humidity, and large loads on the floor surface will be fatal even for the most durable and high-quality linoleum.
Types of materials for flooring
The construction market is ready to offer consumers a fairly large number of options for installing floors in both private housing and industrial premises. All modern materials for flooring can be conditionally divided into hard, synthetic, natural, wooden and carpet. Before you decide on a specific coating, you need to evaluate the purpose of the room, the expected load and the desired interior.
Hard coatings
Tiles, bricks and stone are all hard material for the floor. Tiles used to be used only for the installation of floors in the kitchen and in the bathroom. Such a coating is strong enough and is not afraid of moisture. Tile floors can be washed with detergents. When the tile gets tired, you can remove it and lay another. With the advent of the possibility of installing underfloor heating with water or electric heating, it became possible to arrange tiled floors in living rooms or halls.
For the manufacture of stone coatings, marble and granite, syenite and quartzite, dolomites and dense limestones, slate, gabbro, labradorite are used. If money allows, you can lay the floors of jasper, malachite or rhodonite.
Synthetics on the floor
Quite often, owners use synthetic material. Specialists-builders suggest using vinyl, metal, concrete or rubber for the floor in the apartment.
Vinyl is an inexpensive coating characterized by practicality. Installation can be carried out on any flat and well-dried surface (with constant humidity, the vinyl coating can swell).
Concrete is a mixture of sand and cement and has good plastic properties, but is sensitive to high humidity, temperature fluctuations (especially to the larger side). Subject to chemical and mechanical effects.
The rubber material for the floor is a mixture of rubber, cement, chalk, cork and marble chips. Such coatings have a lot of advantages, the most pronounced of which are flexibility, strength, resistance to temperature extremes and shock loads.
As metal coatings, aluminum and steel (anodized or stainless) are most often used.
Natural materials
Sisal, cork, jute, burlap and, oddly enough, linoleum can be reliably assigned to the group of natural materials for the floor. The fact is that initially this material was really made from natural components: a hot mixture of linseed oil, beeswax, resin is applied to the fabric.
Such materials can be quite expensive. The installation process also has its own characteristics. However, such floors are environmentally friendly, do not accumulate static electricity and look very impressive.
The magic of natural wood
Materials for the wooden floor are made from a variety of types of wood. Oak is considered the most durable and representative candidate, but also the most expensive. The oak floor is able to withstand heavy loads. Maple, beech, elm and ash are also solid types of wood, from which a strong and wear-resistant floor is made. Soft types of wood, from which floor coverings are also made, include linden, birch, cherry, pine. The disadvantages of floors made of such wood include susceptibility to the influence of the biological environment (decay) and a high level of hygroscopicity (moisture absorption).
One of the varieties of wooden floors is a laminate - a multilayer material, the top layer of which consists of wood. This floor covering is protected by a special refractory varnish. The material is easy to install and requires financial investments much less than natural parquet, regardless of the type of wood.
Carpeting
Widespread today is such a material for the floor as carpet. In a section, you can see that the material consists of a pile, a base (primary laying), a fixing layer and a secondary laying (usually this is latex). According to the quality of the fibers, carpets can be divided into synthetic (nylon, acrylic) and natural (wool or silk). A big plus of such a coating is the ease and simplicity of installation and replacement during abrasion. The biggest drawback is that in places of "increased movement" the material tends to wipe. And the myth that “the carpet is harmful because it collects dust” can be interpreted differently: by collecting dust, the carpet significantly (almost halves) its content in the air we breathe.
Preparing the floor for finishing
Before finishing the floor, it must be prepared, leveled, that is, filled with a screed that will work as a kind of base or foundation. For the bulk of the floor coverings, the fluctuations along the horizontal surface up or down should not be more than 2-3 mm in a 2-meter section. Upon visual inspection, the human eye identifies such a surface as completely flat. There are two types of material for floor screed. This can be a ready-made factory cement-sand mixture or a building composition, which is a dry mixture. The binder component in most of these mixtures is cement. The role of the filler is usually performed by sand of various fractions (coarse, fine, medium fraction) and various additives. They, in turn, are also divided into chemical and, in fact, into simple fillers. The former include plasticizers, various hardening accelerators, the latter include fiber, reinforcing fibers, lightweight aggregates such as expanded clay, and polystyrene crumbs.
Thermal insulation for underfloor heating
The “warm floor” system can act as an additional and the main heating element of the room. Today, there are three main types of “warm floor” systems that exist and are successfully used for space heating: water, electric and infrared. Materials for a warm floor - a concrete screed on top of a heating element (pipes with hot water, electrical wires, etc.) and various types of thermal insulation under it. Expanded polystyrene, polypropylene, cork, metallized mylar film are the most widely used as heat insulators . The use of these materials significantly reduces heat loss due to the fact that the floor elements and structures are not heated below the level of laying the “warm floor”.
The choice of material for the heat-insulating layer for the floor depends on which “warm floor” system will be selected and the expected loads to which the floor can be subsequently subjected are taken into account.
Modern technologies: bulk floor
Self-leveling floor is called a seamless floor covering, which with equal success can be used both in a private home and in an industrial room. Materials for bulk floors are special polymer compounds adapted to high loads and mechanical damage. Depending on what polymer composition is used, bulk floors can be divided into several types.
Using methyl methacrylate resin, floor coverings of the same name are mounted. Using other polymer compositions, epoxy and cement-acrylic self-leveling floors are created, the optimal places for which are industrial premises.
However, experts consider the polyurethane bulk floor to be the most universal for any type of premises. Such a floor covering looks very aesthetically pleasing, while possessing a sufficient margin of safety and durability, characterized by good adhesion (adhesion) to any base on which it is mounted. The absence of seams makes this flooring an insurmountable barrier to an aggressive biological environment (fungus, mold), so it can without any doubt be arranged on a balcony, loggia or in the bathroom. Moisture resistance, non-toxicity and hygiene are also characteristic of this gender. The negative aspects include a rather laborious process of preliminary preparation of the base, which includes a thorough filling of cracks, filling and leveling of the surface.