Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: best flooring for Common House?

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Jun 12, 2024, at 1:02 PM, Holly Wilder <hollywilder23 [at] gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> Holly Wilder from Nyland just outside of Boulder, CO here.  We are in 
> conversation about redoing our main level flooring (dining and living rooms 
> areas).  We originally had carpet, which was good for noise reduction, but 
> kinda yucky for an eating area.  After 20 years, we replaced it with cork, 
> which has been lovely in our yoga room, but has worn very badly on the main 
> level.  It’s a high traffic area and it is now (11 years later) full of 
> scratches and deep gauges.  It hasn’t lived up to its promise of durability 
> combined with sustainability at all.  So we’re back to the drawing board 
> trying to figure out what to do next.

We are in the same boat. The community isn’t talking about what to replace it 
with because we are doing other big jobs right now — full exterior painting, 
replacing trim around the windows, replacing wood fencing, repairing newly 
discovered termite damage — all the joys of a 25-year maintenance bump. I have 
been the person who has led replacing our kitchen floor, some hallway floors, 
and the cork in a corridor we have that marks off an accessible path through 
the dining room to the mailboxes.

Everyone loves the cork but it doesn’t wear well and doesn’t refinish at all. 
We have squares so we could replace just squares but it gouges so much that we 
haven’t been able to keep up. We even put out squares to fade so we could 
replace them with already faded new ones. It’s perfect in that it marks off a 
path that is supposed to be left clear for 2 residents who use wheelchairs and 
2+ who use walkers or knee rollers from time to time. It is nicely quiet. We 
have at least one package delivery every day, sometimes three, and the hand 
cart is rough on it. 

We once had the cork “polished” which means they used a screen to sand off the 
surface, but when it was sealed again it came out in a camouflage pattern. Some 
areas were very, very dark. To keep the cork nice, I think it has to be 
polished (liquid wax) probably monthly like linoleum.

The kitchen and hallways are linoleum which has been much better than cork but 
not perfect. It needs maintenance much more often than anyone is willing to do 
it. To keep it from scratching, it should be swept after every meal and damp 
mopped after most. We should also reapply polish monthly ourselves. If we did 
that it would theoretically last forever since the pattern goes all the way 
through and normal wear should only wear off the polish. (My family had 
linoleum years and years ago, forever.) 

We have it professionally polished once a year, but they use machines to screen 
off the old polish and apply new. They don’t recommend that more than once a 
year because it wears out the linoleum. So even linoleum requires more 
maintenance than people realize. 

We have the real Marmoleum in the kitchen and Armstrong linoleum in the 
corridors. The wear has been about the same but the corridors are used much 
less — with no water spilling or food crumbs. 

We have wood in the main areas of the dining room, under the tables. It has 
been refinished I think twice and deep cleaned and a new coat of poly applied 
at least once. It actually has worked very well. It took us many years to learn 
not to use tubs of water on the wood or linoleum. Linoleum is a wood product 
and equally sustainable but requires care. The old musicals with sailors 
swabbing the decks with floppy mops and pails of soapy water were a bad 
example. Completely ruined the first kitchen floor of linoleum planks and did a 
number on the wood as well.

>  We want something durable, easy to maintain, and beautiful, but room 
> acoustics are also a factor because we want to be able to hear each other in 
> that space (community meetings, dinner conversation, etc).

In the office, we had a flood the first year that ruined the original carpet. 
Someone went to Home Depot and came back with boxes of acrylic tile and put 
them down all in an afternoon. They are now almost 25 years old, get almost no 
maintenance, and look like new. And some people were and are still horrified 
that we have acrylic anywhere on the property. 

When you find a solution to this problem please shout it from the rooftops, or 
the common house doors. One thing I have been meaning to do is find a schedule 
for commercial maintenance and replacements so people are more aware that it 
must be done more often than at home. Some shudder at the cost of maintenance. 
And it is frustrating that we research materials so thoroughly, spend months on 
it, argue all the merits from all angles, and choose the more expensive option 
because it is sustainable. Then we have to put in twice or three times the work 
to maintain it.

I don’t mean to be so negative but it is an issue that most of us were not 
prepared for. It has been a learning curve. I think the wood has been the most 
successful in the dining room and would work better if the bottoms of the 
tables had soft surfaces to absorb any noise from scraping chairs and shoes and 
children playing. We are careful to replace the plastic/rubber feet on the 
chairs so they are always smooth and don’t allow them to be used outside on the 
concrete. 

The argument that acrylic floors are bad but they are only done once is growing 
on me. Acrylic seems to be almost permanent  and carefree compared to the other 
options. 

I was researching ceramic tile, with rubber standing mats in places, but they 
crack with motorized electric wheelchairs running over them. I think in the end 
solid hardwood floors with a strong finish are the best option, with area rugs 
in soft seating areas. But solid wood — the other can’t be refinished more than 
twice. And “hard” is critical. 

This isn’t a problem that is exclusive to cohousing; it’s just that we don’t 
have a janitor who cleans up professionally every day.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org