Fully floored!

Jagvir Goyal

Whosoever builds a house, longs to hear words of praise from friends, family and colleagues. After all, these are what encourage a person to continue with this otherwise tiring and money-draining exercise. Attractive elevation, nicely laid floors and openness of the house attract the people most. These are, therefore, paid special attention to by the owner of a house and his architect. Today, let’s discuss the flooring of a house:

Choices at hand

There were times when plain cement floors were laid in the houses. To make them attractive, people would add red colour to the border areas. Concrete floors were replaced by terrazzo flooring, which ruled the scene for over two decades. Multiple colours and designs could be provided in terrazzo flooring and people exploited this option to their heart’s content. Then, marble took over the scene. Then came ceramic tiles, which were followed by vitrified tiles and stole a big segment of marble flooring. This was followed by wooden flooring. House owners today exercise all the flooring choices and are not content with just one type of material.

What’s perfect for you?

As the present trend focuses on multiple choices in flooring, you should  select the right combination carefully. If you feel the urge for wooden laminate flooring, go for that in bedrooms. The drawing room and living room should be provided with marble or tile flooring. The kitchen, too, should have marble or tile flooring. Bathrooms should have anti-skid tile flooring. A basement should be provided with vitrified tile flooring to minimise hassles in floor laying and avoid the mess that marble grinding and polishing creates.

Light vs dark

The quality of material used in the floors certainly adds to their beauty. Good quality Italian marble or white Makrana marble look strikingly beautiful and mesmerise the visitors if finished with good granite or mirror polish. When laid over a sprawling lobby and drawing room, these floors leave the visitors speechless for a moment. White or light colour floors in marble and tiles always look better than dark coloured floors. Due to their light colour, the area covered also looks wider than actual. Use of large sized vitrified tiles also makes the floor attractive. The tile size is kept 1000 mm X 1000 mm or more. For bedrooms, however, it is better to choose slightly darker wooden laminates to hide any scratches or stains that occur during use. Only AC4 or AC5 grade wooden laminates should be chosen. The skirting on the walls should be neatly, but firmly fixed and should comprise of same laminates as that of the floors. Junctions of wooden flooring with other kinds of floorings should be finished by provision of ‘profiles’ provided by wooden flooring supplier.

Designs on tiles

To most people, plain means boring and they want to add designs to the floor to make it more attractive. However, provision of floor designs is a costly preposition. Not only costly, it is time consuming also. However, if one is determined to provide designs in flooring, it can be done only in the drawing room and living room area. Wooden flooring should be kept plain and in one uniform finish of laminates. In marble and tile flooring area, however, unlimited choice of floor designs is available.

While selecting designs, take care that the proportion of the area covered by the designs doesn’t exceed 10 percent of total area of the floor. Adding a periphery border at about a distance of one foot from the walls is the common choice. The border can be in black or green granite or mustard stone. The design pattern to be added to the floor should be circular or rectangular. Floral designs, however, have become quite common and one should look for geometrical designs that look unique and inimitable. The colours used in the design should be darker than that of the main floor and should complement it. Area below the chandelier, below the center table in the drawing room and the lobby and near the main entrance can be chosen for provision of design in the flooring.

Moolah mantra

Provision of designs in the floors is a costly and time-consuming affair. The labour cost of providing these designs is quite high and is over and above the cost of laying, grinding and polishing the area. While laying the border line in black or green, in most of the floors, a 4 mm yellow stone strip is added along each edge of this granite border. The masons and contractors are generally inclined towards providing these yellow strips because the labour cost of laying these is quite high. The rate charged for it is on per running foot basis, while the marble floor is charged at per square foot rate. These yellow strips are, in fact, made of weak stone and wither out after a few years, leaving a gap between the marble slabs and the granite strip. The gap looks very ugly. So, it is better to avoid these. Tiles have made everything easier now. If you are choosing a tiled floor, not only do you save on the cost of their grinding and polishing, but uniform streak pattern in the floor is also achieved. Time saved is another aspect. These days, reputed firms have started producing large-sized tiles having pre-built central designs in them. These tiles can be used to provide design in the flooring area.

— The writer is HoD and Engineer-in-Chief, Civil Engineering Department, in a Punjab PSU