Ceramic Tile - A Natural Flooring Option

Ceramic tile offers many advantages as a floor choice if you wish to avoid petroleum based flooring in your home. Carpet and vinyl flooring not only are mostly oil based, they also stink, sorry but it's true, when new. Plus those floors continue to off gas for years as the fumes become part of your body.

It isn't that ceramics are a low energy product really. The production of tile uses prodigious amounts of energy actually. All that baking and heating sucks up energy in a big way. But at least after manufacture the tiles should last for decades or in some cases centuries. That durability makes for a much longer lived product than typical vinyl flooring or carpet.

What's more, installation of ceramic materials must be done probably only once in the lifetime of most users. Whereas most competing products must be removed and replaced, with all the attendant hassles and cost, multiple times within a lifetime.

Tile installation works so well in so many different circumstances too. Perfect for bathrooms, it there works well on just about every surface from counter tops to shower pans as well as walls and floors.

It really functions well in any room. Even in kitchens, where tile counter tops have been seen as a luxury choice for years, ceramic makes for a great floor. Though dropped dishes and pots and pans often end up cracked when dropped. But besides that problem, the tile makes for a great kitchen floor covering. But then it works outdoors too.

In additions tile is more than practical since it can be an art form too. The installation of the tile involves art, but each individual piece represents art too. That can be in the form of textures or designs or painting on tiles.

Not only is the material environmentally friendly, it also stands up to hard use and is relatively easy to keep clean and easy to maintain. Repair really presents few problems too. A cracked tile can be easily removed and replaced. If no pieces are available to match, a totally contrasting art piece can be used as a replacement for a bit of an artistic touch.

Note that part of a floor is not just the tile pieces but also the grout as well. That's why careful planning of grout can be a large part of the success of a floor. Different types of grout work best in different applications. Some modern grout materials are all but waterproof and make for easy maintenance and cleaning as well.

Other more natural flooring choices like cork, real linoleum and even wood all have limitations. Especially when looking at cost to install and maintain, ceramic tile represents one of the best materials to use in place of vinyl or carpet in flooring.

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Natural Stone Surfaces Should Not Have Topical Finishes Applied - If They Do, Here is How to Fix It

Frequently we are asked to apply urethane or acrylic coatings to a natural stone. Anyone that knows anything about natural stone will tell you these products should never be applied to a stone surface. Stone is porous and proper sealers are resins dispersed in either solvents or water that penetrate the stone and are invisible on the stone surface. Topical finishes, like urethane or epoxy are best used on wood or vinyl, but have no role in natural stone. The reason is that these finishes penetrate the stone and cannot be removed by normal means, as you would vinyl with a simple water based stripper. Stone on the other hand is porous and will not respond to strippers, but will have to be ground out with expensive and labor intensive procedures.

We also find these types of topical finishes applied to tile and grout as a sealer or to just grout as a sealer. We would especially include the consumer product Mop N Glow, a finish suited for vinyl floor finishes. These products are neither appropriate for porcelain, ceramic or stone tiles. Due to the porosity of these materials, topical finishes penetrate deeply and are sometimes impossible to remove - short of grinding or stripping with heavy paint strippers.

Needless to say these are projects that are labor intensive as well as inconvenient to the owners. Heavy paint strippers and solvents are necessary to break down these sealers. They require careful handling due to chemical odors and difficulty of slurry recovery.

Remaining slurry have to be removed with great effort. These processes are time consuming and expensive. Stone floors on occasion have to be ground if acrylic penetrates deep into the product. For these reasons we strongly recommend against application of any acrylic floor finish (intended for use on vinyl flooring) to grouted product.

If you find yourself confronted with a topical sealer applied to your stone, you can try a simple test to remove the sealer. Many floor strippers are based on a glycol ether solvent. Find one of these and apply it to the stone in a small area and see if it loosens the topical sealer. If so you will need a wet vac, or some other manner to remove the accumulated slurry for disposal.

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