Hot Tips: Flooring

Advantages of Seamless Floors

• By Kendall Speer Ellis
• 09/01/15

When choosing floor materials, planners should consider the big picture. There are endless options in colors and styles in most every category of flooring, but finding a floor that meshes with overall design, meets all the performance standards and promises to be easy to clean can be challenge. Planners should look at seamless, resinous hard-surface floors, such as epoxy and urethane poured floors. These “hard” surfaces can still be resilient, but seamless is the key. Seams and grout lines, found in vinyl or other types of tile systems, collect dirt. Dirt invites bacteria. This is not only a maintenance problem, but also a health issue.

Planners may wonder if seamless surfaces will work for every area in a facility. They can work just about everywhere, from kitchens to locker rooms to corridors and classrooms. The design elements many seamless floor companies offer provide tremendous design flexibility: you can incorporate shapes, designs and custom colors to define a space without sacrificing performance characteristics (stain, abrasion and impact resistance) and ease of cleaning.

A multipurpose room, for example, might be changed over eight times in one day: from meeting room to cafeteria to student assembly area to gym. The floor stays the same, but the uses vary and everyone’s needs are accommodated. More importantly, the maintenance staff can move in and out of the room quickly to ready the floor and the room for the next function. A seamless, resilient system meets all these needs, plus keeps noise down and is easy underfoot.

In addition, seamless, non-wax surfaces — available in epoxy and urethane poured-in-place floors — speak loudly to sustainability, and a nonwax surface will result in lower life-cycle costs. Also, the use of urethane-based seamless systems provides increased chemical and stain resistance, particularly in laboratory applications.

This article originally appeared in the issue of .