A Fantastic Choice For The Customer

Well, the holidays are over again for another year, the tan is fading, the bank balance is wincing and we’re on the slippery slope to a long cold winter with nothing to look forward to ‘til Christmas.

Still it’s not all doom and gloom – there’ll be at least another six new types of flooring launched by then to brighten up our humdrum lives and further expand an already bewildering array of products. Currently there are rubbers, smooth vinyls, textured vinyls, tiles, planks, panels, imitation granite and marble. Then there’s PVC pretending to be wood, ceramics, wood in the form of laminates disguised as ceramics, and even wood masquerading as itself. Oh, did I mention safety floorings? And we’ve not even touched on resins or carpet.

All in all an incredible choice of flooring types widely ranging in price and quality, not to mention availability, durability, usability, coveability, likeability and (today’s buzz word) sustainability.

It was a lot easier when I started out in the game in the good old dark ages; there was wood, which had already been around for ever, a bit of contract carpet, linoleum, rubber, thermo plastic tiles, some unstable contract vinyl sheet at either three or six feet wide and good old Altro safety flooring, which came in only one format in those days and in just six colours. Half a dozen basic products covered the entire flooring needs of a nation.

Availability – was limited, as the distributor network of today was non existent. Flooring contractors either bought from the extremely limited number of outlets with even more limited stock, or direct from the manufacturer, which usually meant spending an hour of your life waiting in line to place your order with someone on the trade counter before driving round the back and being ignored by the warehouse staff, to eventually collect your materials.

Durability – was a suck it and see affair. Early flexible vinyl tiles wore out too quickly, so someone had the brilliant idea of loading them up with asbestos. It did make them last longer – so long in fact that some are still around today, and the problem is that nobody wants to take them up, for obvious reasons. However in those blissfully ignorant and innocent days the dangers were unknown, and the floor layers of my era installed these products day in day out.

Usability – most products in those days were difficult to use, especially by today’s standards. Floor laying was a hard job and not yet recognised as a trade, so it was head down, backside in the air until the job was finished, whatever the product.

Coveability – not much was coved back then, except for a few thermo plastic tile installations, most of which were early attempts to cover in situ terrazzo or granolithic cove details. Of course when I joined Altro some years later, almost every job we did was coved, and now much of the available contemporary flooring can be coved with many people possessing the necessary skill to carry out this exacting work.

Likeability – it didn’t much matter whether you liked a product or not. There was so little choice that changing from one sheet vinyl to another held no advantage for the flooring contractor and it might have been a jump from the frying pan into the fire so better the devil you know, to abuse a cliché or two!

Sustainability – well in those halcyon days, the world seemed to be a bottomless pit of natural resources, oil was in abundance and there was thought to be no shortage of anything that took your fancy for the rest of time. How very different today! Oil, from which we derive PVC, is so depleted that the North Sea is expected to be devoid of this precious commodity within 15 years if you believe the experts, so sustainability is now the order of the day.

Anyway, all this adds up to a fantastic (though often confusing) choice for the consumer, but at an ever increasing cost to the environment. Schemes like our Recofloor partnership with Axion and Polyflor will hopefully mean we won’t all be forced to live on the moon in a few years time. Think of all the air miles we’ll save by avoiding that commute…

This article first appeared in the November 2009 edition of the CFJ.