Anyone have any real-world experience with resilient flooring?

[psmith2.0]

Looking to do something in my Mom's kitchen. She's got godawful, 20-year-old ugly linoleum that's chipped, stained, scuffed, etc. all to hell.

I was at Home Depot and saw this product (the "plank" resilient flooring, made to look like wood). It's flexible, waterproof, goes over existing flooring (lays on a black rubber "gripper mat" surface, and adheres to it instead of your subfloor). "No prep" the display signage touts...

Just reading the brochure and the POP stuff at Home Depot (and a few online pieces), it almost seems to good to be true (economical, easy to install, looks nice, etc.).

She's not rich (and I'm not that skilled of a laborer), so any talk of true wood or tile flooring is off the table.

It's a small kitchen, probably about 11x8 of viewable/usable floorspace, so we're not talking a massive "designer kitchen" like you see on HGTV or anything.

Speaking of HGTV, I've seen Candice Olsen do a couple of basements and a kitchen using resilient flooring products, and she doesn't mess around or do crappy work, so I figure it can't be all bad.

:confused:

Anyone?

Experience? Advice? Tips? Additional info? Precautions? Warnings? Praise? Condemnation? Pros? Cons? Satisfaction? Hate it?

:)

BTW, this is what I was looking at:

Trafficmaster Allure. (http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ContentView?pn=BP_Trafficmaster_Allure&langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=)

:confused:

It looks pretty damn nice in person, I gotta say. For this particular application, especially (it beats the living crap out of what's there now, believe me).

The display at Home Depot:

http://homepage.mac.com/pscates/mockups/flooring.jpg

[Yontsey]

I'd love to hear about this as well. I just bought a house and I was going to look at some real wood floors but I this caught my eye because it seems like it's a little better quality then pergo flooring. I could be wrong though.

[billybobsky]

it's basically a new type of vinyl flooring...

with all the problems associated with it...

[ronmexico]

It can be a little noisy when you walk on it. It clacks unlike real wood. But it looks good and for your application it should work fine.

[Trumpetman]

I'd say give it a go. When I bought my apartment building, it had the same issue, very dated linoleum. I could afford new carpet, but not new linoleum through out five units. So I did the vinyl squares and went to work myself. We ended up replacing them with linoleum over time when tenants would move out that was several years down the road. However they are much harder on what was much cheaper stuff than your Mom would ever be. Plus your Mom probably does things like clean her house too unlike some tenants.:lol:

Give it a shot. I'm sure it will work out well and the only argument might be how long it would last. My ultracheap vinyl solution still lasted about seven years so I'm sure this would last at least double that. The squares themselves never actually wore out. A couple of the tenants were just so dirty that dirt had gotten into the seems and over times created unsightly gaps. We replaced them for better visual appeal.

You can go into quite the Zen state when laying them down too. Bring some incense.:lol:

[k squared]

Looking to do something in my Mom's kitchen. She's got godawful, 20-year-old ugly linoleum that's chipped, stained, scuffed, etc. all to hell.

Have you considered new linoleum flooring? If it's properly maintained (just like everything else...) it's a great renewable and sustainable product.

[T-Man]

Satisfaction here, I suppose. It's in my living room, and nothing bad has come from it. The only thing to note is that it should've been cut more precisely to the walls, as it's now slid out of place slightly.

My grandma also had ancient linoleum in her apartment (much like how you described); going off my living room example, this flooring would've made the apartment look so much better.

Note (after better looking at picture): is that, like, bendable 'linoleo-wood' strips? I'm talking about this fit-together flooring (http://www.fantastic-floor.com/). If you can deal with a light amount of sawing, I would not go with faux-wood that comes with the extra hassle of being in stripped pieces; might as well just buy another 11x8 piece of linoleum, in my opinion. :\

[alcimedes]

We have that stuff in our kitchen, or something very similar. I would say, the one thing I found was that if water sits on it long enough, it can cause swelling.

We had a fridge that was leaking water onto the floor, behind it so we never saw it. It def. got damaged, but those were under excessive conditions.