Help me find white vinyl flooring in rolls! Please!

January 9, 2010 5:52 PM

Does white vinyl flooring exist in sheets?

So I am almost finished with my workroom. It is all white and just a joy to behold (at least for me). Trouble is the flooring.

What I have now:
-One layer of 1/2 "plywood
-One smooth layer of gypsum plaster sanded 2 or 3x
-Three layers of oil-based white floor & porch paint

The flooring has a wonderful texture and color, but tends to buckle over some areas - there were cats in the room before and everywhere they sprayed the plaster does not stick. This is a problem.

I have tried sanding and scraping, scrubbing and soaping. Nothing seems to matter. As soon as it buckles the aroma of 15 cats floods the room and it is all downhill from there.

So as much a s I hate vinyl and plastics, I have decided to look for sheets of it. The problem is that I can't seem to find what I need.

I need white vinyl sheets in widths of 12-16 feet that have no pattern or texture. I can find tiles that are semi-white with flecks of grey, blue, green, and any number of colors... I can find rolls that are white with terrible things stamped into them, but I can't find industrial strength white sheeting with no pattern or color.

I would like it to be solid and buffable, like the Armstrong flooring you see in schools and industrial uses.

Ideas? Links?

I have two large rooms of 12x32' and 16x32' as well as a couple of offices and closets that are something like 8x7' each.

I am overall happy with the paint (or at least the way it looks - a solid expanse of shiny white), but the Chicago winters are hard on them (salt and high heeled boots do a number on them), and like I wrote - the cat splashes are a terrible thing to deal with.

I cannot keep spending 200$US every 6 months to keep them nice. I just finished replastering and don't think I can do it again - I have to scrape the floor, then plaster, then sand a couple of times, then paint 3x just to have to do it again in 6 months. It makes me cry.

Please, askme, help me to cry 2x less over the next 12 months!

posted by Tchad to home & garden (4 answers total)

Here is some kind of shiny white floor: Lonstage UV. No idea about price. Some ideas in this post about white floors. There seem to be a few options from Armstrong: 1, 2.

Are you totally averse to installing wood and painting that? Like a white wash over something without much grain?
posted by barnone at 6:17 PM on January 9, 2010

Linoleum. Don't know if anyone makes a bright white but some of Armstrongs products are light or "white".

It can't be installed over bubbling plaster though. You'll need to screw down an underlayment first.

If you like the paint then once you have a good underlayment fastened down you could paint it and then top coat 3-5 times with a polyurethane used for hardwood. It'll last several years and then when it does get worn down, as long as you don't leave it too long, you can use a polyurethane prep and then coat it again.
posted by Mitheral at 6:39 PM on January 9, 2010

Mitheral is right, if the plaster is failing it's going to fail again after you cover it, and that will be worse.

We installed solid color commercial rubber flooring in my parents' bathroom 10 or 15 years ago. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're willing to do a lot of scrubbing, but if you insist on a white floor, maybe that isn't an issue. It's certainly indestructible.
posted by ecurtz at 7:01 PM on January 9, 2010

The Loneseal option looks like my best bet. I just put in an order for a sample. It helps that one of the demonstration photos is downtown in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. So I can see how the floor really looks. it comes in rolls that are 6'x60' so that helps.

I never thought about rubber flooring, so I am looking into that as well. I have one of those large buffer/scrubbers, so cleaning it isn't a problem. Color and overall look/feel are my main concerns.

I have numerous samples from Armstrong, but none of the whites are clean enough. They are all murky (too grey or creamy) or flecked.

I seriously thought about hardwood flooring painted white and finished before it is installed, then finished again. I ran up some samples, but the break between boards really bothered me, so that is out. I want as few seams as possible.

It is too bad - the first room and the offices/closets I did with the plaster and paint 4 years ago are still fine, so it bothers me that the larger second room is such a problem.

One thing I failed to mention - I want to keep the number of screws or nails to a minimum. The floors I am working with were already here, but under two different layers of subfloor are (and this shocked me) 1" walnut tongue and groove. Why anyone would cover them is unknown to me - probably something to do with the building being modernized in the 1950s and again in the 1970s. Point is - I don't know what condition they are in (my educated guess is that they are 50% intact over the whole area), but could see at some point trying to rescue them. I don't have the time, space, or energy right now but want to keep them mothballed for the time being. I didn't know about them until a few months ago, and they don't fit with the look of the place, but having worked in a number of old houses, walnut is something really special and generally unseen. So I have to factor that in as a known unknown.

Thanks, guys!
posted by Tchad at 5:25 AM on January 10, 2010