For a long time vinyl flooring was considered the poor cousin to carpet, laminate flooring and tiles; as many people think of vinyl flooring as being the old linoleum type of flooring that their grandparents had down in their kitchen, and admittedly a lot of old linoleum floors were of poor quality.
The name linoleum used to be a trademarked term but is now a generic term and has been abbreviated over the years to “lino”, which is a term people often use when talking about vinyl.
However vinyl is actually very different to linoleum in its manufacture as it is made of polyvinyl chloride, and hence the name has also been abbreviated to “vinyl”. Lino is as such no longer made, although widespread use of the name still exists.
Modern vinyl flooring is substantially different from the old Lino floors produced in the 1950s, in that it is now highly fade resistant and will not begin to fade in the sun or from continual mopping as the older floors did.
Also the modern vinyl variants do not tend to go brittle and crack like the older Lino floors; this means they can be easily replaced by simply rolling them up, whereas many of the older floorings became stuck to the sub-base over a period of time and required substantial effort to remove them.
Indeed this problem can become so bad over a long period of time that if you find it on the floor in an old house and it has been down since the 1950s then it is often easier to just cover it with underlay and carpet over it rather than try and remove it.
Modern vinyl flooring will also not crack. Although being made from a softer construction than Lino, it will scratch easier than Lino, as the latter was almost a rigid form of flooring and had a much tougher surface. Indeed so much so in that in America it was once known as “Battleship Linoleum” as it was used on the decks of battleships instead of wood, however this was changed after Pearl harbour as it was clear that the flooring was highly flammable. However it illustrates how tough linoleum was.
Due to the way it is made, vinyl flooring now wins every time as it is far easier to produce in a wide range of colours and even add different textures to its surface.
Beautiful Flooring Direct offer a huge range of nearly two hundred colours and styles of sheet vinyl, and provide an easy to website to buy vinyl tiles online too. Prices start from just £9.99 per metre squared, with free delivery to one of our collection points which are located throughout the UK.
