A Little Something About Vinyl Flooring...

Okay, Lets talk Vinyl Flooring.....

Vinyl flooring. Is this flooring the ugly sister of all other flooring? Why would consumers buy vinyl flooring?

For the last bunch of years vinyl flooring has been losing market share to all other hard surface flooring options. Hardwood, ceramic tile and even laminate has been taking market share from the vinyl flooring segment. Until recently.....

Vinyl flooring is making a comeback! With new lifelike stunning visuals in the vinyl flooring space, vinyl flooring is not your grandmas linoleum.......far from it.  New improvements in the finish has made vinyl flooring durable, soft and very resistant to tearing, scratching and gouging.

No longer do you see the old white and black squares with the shiny finish. Now you will see realistic wood grain patterns, lifelike stone looks with matte finishes. New fiberglass backings allow vinyl to be laid without full spread adhesive so installation is becoming much easier. Less muss and fuss.

Another advantage to vinyl is the fact that overall it costs less than most all other hard surface choices. Vinyl flooring is said to have the best value in the business when it comes to hard surface flooring. Plus it is impervious to water. Vinyl flooring comes in 12 ft wide sheets and hence has less issues with seaming. You can cover a relatively large area with one sheet of vinyl flooring without having a seam. No seams means no water gets through to the subfloor underneath.

Vinyl flooring great for laundry rooms, kitchens, foyers, entry ways and mud rooms and will cost a fraction of what hard wood flooring would cost or ceramic tile.

So, to sum up, vinyl flooring has price advantages, resistance to water advantages and softness of flooring advantages. All reasons why vinyl flooring is starting to make a comeback.




Jeff Dean
Owner of Dover Floor Covering
http://www.doverfloorcovering.com

A Little Something About Soft Yarn In New Carpet

Soft yarn! The consumers love it. But is it the best yarn for the consumer.

First off; how it's made. The fiber manufacturers have worked with the yarn to get smaller and smaller deniers. The smaller the denier the softer the yarn. But how does it perform?

Nylon yarn is naturally a high wearing fiber. Very resilient. It will stand up to even the toughest of wear patterns. The smaller deniered yarn is still nylon but because of the inherent softness it will start to mush (is that a technical term? LOL) down and kind of pack together like snow. Because it can do this the appearance can take a hit if the denier is too small (hence softer yarn).

Also, there have been complaints industry wide of vacuuming problems with the ultra soft yarns. The fiber manufacturers and the carpet mills have gone to great lengths to educate the flooring sales people and the consumer of the requirement that ultra soft yarns require in a vacuum cleaner. Most vacuum cleaners just don't perform on ultra soft yarns because the yarns are mushing down (not matting). Matting down is quite different from mushing down. A matted carpet can be pulled up and pileated with a good vacuum cleaner whereas the same vacuum cleaner will not pull up the ultra soft yarns.

So, what about soft yarns. Overall they are a good product. Soft to the touch, resilient and high wear. Where the jury is still out is in the ultra soft yarns. They don't have the test of time on their side and with the fact that you will probably have to buy a new vacuum cleaner along with the high cost of the ultra soft carpet your initial outlay will be pretty hefty. In our opinion the ultra soft yarns are probably not worth the money you spend on them, the buying a new vacuum factor and the fact that performance is still in question, we prefer to stick with the mid deniered soft yarn systems that will give you higher performance and won't break the bank on a new high end vacuum.




Jeff Dean
Owner of Dover Floor Covering
http://www.doverfloorcovering.com

Are Berbers Going Away?

There was a time when Berbers had a large market share in the carpet industry. Probably about 15 to 20 years ago (where does the time go?) lots of people were asking for Berber carpet. Why was this?

Well, for years consumers had been buying "trackless" carpet. This was a variation of the old plush carpets that you really don't see much anymore. Styles come and styles go and consumers were just tired of the same old thing. After all, how many different ways can you construct new carpet? Trackless carpet is called "textured" in the carpet industry. The old plushes that had a smooth, shiny finish that showed every foot print and vacuum mark were becoming passe and consumers were looking for new carpet that wouldn't show everything right after vacuuming.

So the carpet mills started making textures (trackless). Friezes became popular. Friezes are textured carpets that are really really textured.
Some people likened them to spaghetti because a heavy frieze could look like spaghetti. They didn't show foot prints or vacuum marks. Consumers loved that.

About this time, the carpet mills started to really market the Berbers. They weren't cut pile like the plushes, twists and friezes. They were different. Berbers were made in a loop construction style. This was a very high wearing style indeed! Carpets that are made in the cut pile style will wear on the tips (where the cut pile is). Because the carpet yarn was cut, then the tips would wear and fray with normal wear and tear. Berbers, on the other hand, didn't have this weakness. The top of the carpet where people walked was now a loop and hence the wear was on a the sides of the yarn, not the tips. The side of carpet yarn is almost impossible to wear through with normal residential traffic. So Berbers were very high wearing.

Also, because of the loop construction, the Berber carpet would be very resilient.  As the loops were trod upon, the loop would press down and then bounce back up when walked off. So Berbers were high wearing and resilient. Both good traits.

Some cons to Berber carpets was the fact that carpet seams would show more than on a cut pile carpet and the loops could get caught, pull and run. So why are Berber carpets going the way of the dodo bird? Well, really, I don't know......

Where once I had probably 25% of my carpet samples in the Berber style, now I probably have 5%. People are just not asking for Berbers much these days. As Berber styles get discontinued by the mills, they don't replace them with new Berber styles. So as they get discontinued, my supply of Berber samples just keeps shrinking. Now I have very few and most of them are solid color Berbers. The flecked Berbers are almost gone.

So if you want a Berber carpet, you may want to get it soon as the Berber style is slowly going away.....of course, it'll come back around in 10 years with a slightly different slant. After all, who would have thought that the shag would ever come back, eh? LOL



Jeff Dean
Dover Floor Covering
http://doverfloorcovering.com