Bathrooms receive some of the highest traffic in a household. Everyone visits a home’s bathroom at least once a day. For this reason, many homeowners focus on their bathroom’s décor, making it an oasis of beauty.
Choosing the right flooring for bathrooms in your home can result in an easier-to-care-for home that works to help you keep the bathroom cleaner. It’s true. Some woods, like bamboo, have inherent anti-microbial properties, making them ideal for use in bathrooms.
Your choice also needs to provide a waterproof surface. Bathtubs run over. Toilets back up. Life happens. Waterproof flooring ensures your subfloor doesn’t incur damage when any of these or other bathroom disasters occur. So, what choices does that offer you?
Use Tile: Ceramic or Porcelain
These waterproof options come in so many designs that you can find one that looks like any other type of flooring. For example, some ceramic or porcelain tiles look like wood flooring. Others take on the appearance of stone. Tile costs much less than wood or stone, making this durable solution popular. Although they offer a cold surface if your home has radiant heat flooring, tile offers a receptive solution. Tiles get slippery when wet, but using textured surfaces or small tiles that require more grout between them, results in greater traction.
You Love the Look of Stone
Stone offers durability and elegance, but it doesn’t offer a waterproof surface. Instead, consider pebbled tiles or glass tiles. If you don’t mind resealing your floors every few years, you could choose marble or granite flooring and only need to reseal every five years. A choice like limestone or travertine means you must reseal them every two years.
Cork Flooring
Cork, like the stuff you make a bulletin board from, also comes in flooring. This springy textured wood offers a waterproof solution that provides excellent traction in the bathroom’s steamy, damp environment. It comes in many grain patterns so that it can complement many decors. For the best results, reseal the floor every couple of years. It also offers one of the two most environmentally sound choices among the bathroom flooring options since no cork tree gets cut down to make cork products. Instead, loggers harvest the bark from the tree, which grows back completely in nine years.
Bamboo Flooring
As mentioned, bamboo offers an anti-microbial surface and looks like a hardwood floor. Other reasons to choose bamboo include its environmentally sound properties. Bamboo grows to its maturity in just three years. Actually, as a member of the grass family, you could say it grows like a weed with some accuracy. Bamboo offers the best of both worlds if you love the look of wood floors but hate the idea of clear-cutting. Bamboo grows on farms as a harvestable crop. It in no way harms the environment and, like cork, offers one of the two wood family options ideal for any room of the home, especially the bathroom.
You Love the Look of Hardwood
Solid hardwood and bathrooms do not mix. However, you can use the look of hardwood in a bathroom using laminate or engineered hardwood. Laminate combines wood chips with other materials to form planks that look like natural wood that already has a finish applied. Engineered hardwood consists of a thin strip of hardwood veneer on top of a plywood plank. Both options apply sealants and finishing products that help the product last in a humid environment like a bathroom.
Vinyl Flooring Choices
Inexpensive vinyl earned a bad rap because of the thinnest, cheapest options in its vast family. Choose genuine linoleum from a cornucopia of natural ingredients, including linseed oil. It resists water, and you can easily install it. For the best results in a bathroom, choose wood plastic composite (WPC) vinyl, the thicker option that also offers greater flexibility. Although vinyl comes in tiles, planks, and sheets, the sheet option works best in bathrooms.
Why Not Concrete?
Your slab foundation uses concrete, so why not your bathroom floors? Concrete provides all the toughness needed and a waterproof surface. Concrete floors offer a hard, cold finish, though. Bathrooms where people bathe and, therefore, typically go barefoot don’t offer the ideal environment for concrete. Also, concrete easily becomes slick and can cause falls. If you must use it, texture the concrete to add traction and use throw rugs to add warmth.
The Difference Between Waterproof and Water Resistant
The terms waterproof and water-resistant mean different things. A waterproof item won’t allow water to enter it. If submerged, it retains its shape and sturdiness. A water-resistant item, however, resists water temporarily, but eventually, the water penetrates it. When that happens, it damages the item.
When building, remodeling, or renovating a home, you can save money using water-resistant flooring in almost every room. In the bathroom, you should choose waterproof flooring. Although waterproof flooring costs a little more, it won’t swell, warp, or peel when moist. Over time, these things do happen to water-resistant flooring. Waterproof flooring also helps prevent the development of mildew and mold in the bathroom, a common area in homes for these dangerous fungi to grow.
Choosing Your Perfect Bathroom Flooring
Choosing the best flooring for bathroom projects in your home depends on your personal tastes, but you’ll experience the best results if you pick from the options discussed in this article. Each one offers a waterproof choice that complements bathroom decors and provides excellent traction.
Start your flooring journey at From the Forest, a specialty flooring store that offers a multitude of wood and wood-looking options ideal for every room of the home. Find your perfect waterproof bathroom floor today.