This article was written by Bryan Sebring of Sebring Services, located in Naperville. Providing basement remodeling, kitchen remodeling, and bathroom renovation design-build services.
Wooden floor looks great, indeed. In fact, for many of us, good-looking wooden floors induce a feeling of comfort, coziness and luxury. They also match most of the existing house designs and color patterns. Wooden floor combines greatly with any of those:
- White plain walls
- Textured walls, including bricks, stone, tiles, and wood
- Dark hardwood floor combines well with modern and minimalistic house designs, while lighter colors are often used in shabby chic styled houses.
All those benefits are the reason why so many people use them. Now, the question is, could it be even better than that?
Even Better Than Wooden Floor
The answer is yes, there’s still room for improvement. Wooden floor looks great, but it has some downsides worth considering. Ask any homeowner about those downsides. The first things that will surely come to his/her mind are maintenance issues. In fact, many home cleaning companies make a good buck by providing wooden floor cleaning services. Those include the usage of chemicals, cleaners, waxes and other expensive substances.
In additional to those, wooden floor has a porous surface. Even decades after being installed, it tends to emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Those are highly-toxic substances, and they tend to contribute to many health problems. Not that they’re deadly, but studies shown that they are a significant cause of “sick building syndrome”.
Is There Any Decent Alternatives to Wooden Floor?
Although hardwood floors were used for centuries and there will be always people who’ll keep using them, there is a healthier alternative.
If you’d love to preserve the gorgeous wooden floor looks while enjoying more benefits, then wood looking tile is definitely worth your consideration.
As its name suggests, those are tiles made of porcelain or ceramic. Thanks to modern technologies, it’s possible to shape and paint them on a way that they’d look 100% like wood. In fact, according to one of the latest polls, 56% of people couldn’t tell the difference between real wood and porcelain wood tiles. They look absolutely identical.
What Are the Advantages of Wood Looking Tile?
Porcelain and ceramic tile is widely considered as the healthiest floor and wall coating material. There’s a reason why it’s used in kitchens and bathrooms as well. Here are some of the benefits of ceramic and porcelain tile:
- It’s waterproof; it doesn’t get deformed by moisture or humidity.
- The above also means that its maintenance is extremely easy and cheap – ceramic tile can be easily cleaned with warm water.
- Its life cycle is far longer than the one of hardwood. In fact, properly installed tile will last a lifetime.
- Thanks to the high-temperature treatment, it releases no volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
- Tile is inhospitable to germs, dust, mites, bacteria and mold, which makes ceramic tile floors perfectly hypoallergenic.
- Ecology: for those of you who care about ecology, rest reassured that tile is way more eco-friendly than hardwood. Besides the fact that tile is made of non-organic material, hardwood coating manufacturing also requires a wide gamma of chemicals, some of which are rather toxic.
Combine those pros with the elegant looks of wood, and you’ll get probably the best floor ever. If you’d like to know more about it, take a look at the full article here: Tile That Looks Like Wood vs Hardwood Flooring.