LAKE CABINET & FLOORING, INC.

Floors With Style !

•  Floors With Style
•  What's Hot
•  Construction
•  What's New
•  Vinyl Tiles
  

No other floor covering category offers the variety of colors and patterns as vinyl flooring! Thanks to some great advancements in styling and technology, today's vinyl floors have been changed forever.  The unique manufacturing processes used today can replicate the look and textures of real ceramic tile, stone and wood grains. Plus, the resilient manufacturers have created new manufacturing processes to make vinyl floors more tear and stain resistant.   Once you have paged through the various pages in the vinyl flooring section you should have a better understanding of how these new generation vinyl floors have changed forever the way we think at vinyl floors. We here at Lake Cabinet & Flooring Inc. we feature the vinyl floors of Mannington, Stainmaster and Armstrong.  Please click on the links or stop in soon to see today's vinyl flooring.

What's Hot

Stainmaster's and Mannington's upper end lines have some excellent products in update realistic patterns of unprecedented appeal.

Mannington Adura line of luxury Vinyl offers unprecedented looks and quality.

Sheet Vinyl Construction

Homeowners are offered two types of residential sheet vinyl flooring. The older construction type is called inlaid construction and the newer, more common construction type is called rotogravure construction.  The inlaid process uses solid colored vinyl chips that are laid on top of a carrier sheet and then bonded together with heat and pressure. The inlaid process has been around for years and generally results in geometric type patterns and designs. Residential inlaid floors have a clear wear-layer placed over the top of the chips to make the floor's finish easier to maintain. It is important to note that you are not walking directly on the inlaid chips, instead you are walking on the clear wear-layer that was placed on top of the chips. The appearance of your inlaid floor is dependent on how long the clear finish will last.  The rotogravure printing process is the most commonly used method for making residential vinyl floors and offers unlimited possibilities in pattern and design. This involves a print cylinder that spins around while the vinyl's core layer (called the gel coat) passes underneath. The cylinder systematically prints various colored ink dyes to create the pattern. After the print dyes are set a clear wear-layer is applied to the surface. Like the inlaid the appearance retention of a rotogravure floor is dependent on the durability of the clear wear-layer.    

The wear-layer is critical to the performance of a vinyl floor. The thickness of the wear-layer varies with each manufacturer's collection, or series and is generally measured in mils. The thickness of a mil is about the same as a page in your telephone book. So a 10 mil wear-layer would be comparable in thickness to about 10 pages in your telephone book.

The more expensive vinyl floors generally will have a thicker wear-layer and a much better finish. Your expectations for how long your vinyl floor will look like new are usually based on the wear-layer's performance. To help you understand wear-layer construction we need to define what the performance characteristics are we are looking for in a vinyl floor. These performance characteristics can be broken into several key areas:

	Easy to clean
	Stays looking like-new
	Resists staining from normal household products
	Doesn't show scratches easily
	Resistance to tearing, gouging, ripping and indentations

The easy to clean relates to how tough it is to remove soiling and other marks from a floor's surface. When a floor begins to look old and drabby it is usually caused by hundreds of fine hair-line scratches in the wear-layer. The fine scratches come from dirt, girt, and sand rubbing on the wear-layer's surface.  Another problem low-end floors and older vinyl floors have is staining of the wear-layer, which can happen from asphalt driveway sealers, Kool-Aid, plant food, marking pens, etc. If you can trade up to a better grade of vinyl flooring you will have much better performance.    Today, manufacturers are building all-around, much better performing vinyl floors than ever before. Armstrong has ToughGuard™ Flooring and warrants against tearing, gouging, ripping and discoloration. Mannington offers GUARDIAN™, a tough Innercore™ construction to help protect the floor and is guaranteed not to rip, tear, gouge or permanently indent.    The new, high-end vinyl floors have better technology to help resist showing wear and staining far better than any of the middle to low-end vinyl floors made today. The special urethane finishes used on today's residential, high-end vinyl floors will give you a richer looking floor, better designs, better tear-resistance and much better performance!

What's New:  Adura Luxury Vinyl Tile

This is vinyl like you've never seen before. Adura® Luxury Vinyl Tiles and Vinyl Planks let you enjoy the elegance of ceramic tile or the natural look of wood in easy care, high performance vinyl.

There's a style for everyone – from classic stone designs like slate and travertine, to contemporary marbles, burnished metallics and popular woods.

Adura® floors come in 16"x16" tiles and 5"x48" wood plank formats. All are exceptionally durable and a breeze to clean. And because Adura® comes in so many patterns and colors, it's easy to find the one that works for you!

These are not your home center peal and stick junk vinyl tiles

 Vinyl Tiles:

Vinyl tiles offer two advantages over sheet vinyl and one disadvantage.    Because they are individual pieces they are easier to install and handle than sheet vinyl.   (If your installing it yourself and you make a mistake in cutting you lost one tile not the entire sheet)  Also if one does become damaged it is the easiest floor to repair or replace a tile.  The one disadvantage is that there are seams surrounding each piece of floor and over time these seams can become dirty and more noticeable especially on light colored floors.  Or have even open overtime with sub-floor movement.

Today Vinyl tiles are available in a wide variety of styles, colors and quality.   Typically there are 3 basic types or groupings of vinyl tile.  First there are commercial Vinyl Composition tiles.  These are the tiles you see on the floor of your local Wxllmart, Txrget, K-mxrt ect ... these are typically inexpensive, easy to install and care for.   Next there are the cheap vinyl composition residential tiles  like you'd see at your big home centers.  Thankfully these tiles are slowly losing there place in the market.   These are typically low cost and low quality tiles and often come with a self stick adhesive of the back.   Last and most important are the High Vinyl content tiles that we focus on here at Lake Cabinet & Flooring.  They offer excellent quality, appearance and ease of care.