Vinyl Boss: Should You Choose Sheet Vinyl Or Vinyl Tiles For Your Kitchen?
Vinyl flooring is one of the most durable, stain-resistant and long-lived flooring choices available today, so it's no surprise that many kitchens across Australia and the rest of the world are fitted with vinyl flooring.
However, if you choose to install vinyl flooring in your kitchen, you may have trouble deciding what style of vinyl to choose -- vinyl sheeting and vinyl tiles are both widely available, and while pretty much any vinyl floor is capable of handling the abuse meted out to the average kitchen floor, these two types of vinyl flooring have their own distinct properties and advantages. Make sure that you know which type of vinyl flooring is best suited to your kitchen needs before you hand over your money.
What are the advantages of choosing sheet vinyl for my kitchen?
As its name would suggest, sheet vinyl flooring consists of a single, continuous sheet of vinyl, which is cut to size before being installed in your kitchen. Sheet vinyl floors are available in a wide variety of styles, and custom orders can feature a colour or pattern of your choice.
Sheet vinyl flooring has one big advantages above all others -- price. Sheet vinyl floors generally cost significantly less than vinyl tile floors per square foot, while providing more or less the same levels of durability and resistance to staining. Sheet vinyl floors are also much quicker and easier to fit than vinyl tiles, since they are applied in a single piece before being sealed to the floor at the edges of the room. This will further lower installation prices, especially if your floor is installed by professionals.
Sheet vinyl is also the vinyl floor of choice if you desire some of the most sanitary, mould-proof flooring available. With no seams between tiles or planks to deal with, sheet vinyl floors are very easy to clean and sterilise thoroughly, and they have no nooks or crannies in which bacteria and fungi can thrive. Seamless construction also means water cannot leak between tiles or planks, protecting your floorboards from damaging rot.
What are the advantages of choosing vinyl tiles for my kitchen?
Vinyl tiles are very similar in construction to the traditional ceramic tiles found in most bathrooms. However, they do not require long and tedious grouting sessions to install -- some can be applied with a simple floor adhesives, while others feature special slats that allowed them to be slotted together into a single continuous floor.
Vinyl tiles are ideal for the aesthete, as they are manufactured in a truly dizzying array of styles, colours and shapes. This allows for an enormous degree of customisation when it comes to designing your floor, allowing you to mix and match tiles for a truly unique kitchen. This wide array of shapes also makes vinyl tiles useful if you are flooring an irregularly shaped kitchen.
The other big advantage of vinyl tiles is how easy they are to repair. While vinyl floors are enormously durable, they can suffer cuts and tears, especially as they age, but while repairing a torn sheet vinyl floor necessitates removing and replacing the entire floor sheet, vinyl tile floors can be repaired by simply switching out the damaged tile(s) for replacements.
