Shaw Commercial Carpet Tiles
[5th-main]
As the manager of a church, you may have a lot more things on your mind than how your flooring affects attendees in your denomination. While most churches like yours have a weekly higher calling in creating sermons and growing members, your flooring is just as important in numerous ways.
You may not look at your floor as a form of branding. Yet, it’s a crucial piece of how visitors perceive your church’s surroundings. Even if your visitors don’t appear to pay attention to your floor, it makes up a significant part of your interior design.
When your floor looks overly worn, it could bring a lot of misconceptions.
Take a look at the types of flooring you can use to look your best, including styles for different religious organizations.
Using VCT Tile
Maybe you manage a Catholic church that holds weekly functions throughout the year. Have you looked at your flooring recently to see how it’s holding up? Your church may hold summer school for younger attendees, something that could wreak havoc on the floor you’re already using.
Children aren’t the only people who can wear out a floor quickly. The flooring in your main altar and platform area can start to show wear after years of continual floor traffic. It’s the same with aisles in your church where visitors walk in and out every weekend.
Also, don’t forget about office areas where your church staff do their work throughout the week.
For heavy foot traffic, VCT flooring is an excellent choice. VCT stands for Vinyl Composition Tile, and its durable construction is very popular with many churches.
If you’re looking for a particular brand guaranteed to hold up for years, you’ll never go wrong using Armstrong. They’ve designed their VCT products in a way bringing not only durability, but also beautiful aesthetics.
Thanks to flowing linear patterns, organic looks, and densely patterned earth tones, you have a floor space capable of covering up scuffing and dirt. It means no matter how much use your floor gets in your church, you’ll have long-life value.
Some of the features Armstrong uses to make this happen include Exclusive Fast Start® Factory Finish to help make maintenance easy. Since your church maybe can’t afford continual maintenance, you’ll see proof why Armstrong is such a flooring leader.
Also, using Armstrong’s Diamond 10 Technology, you’ll have a surface that’s impossible to damage. The budget value you’ll get out of this will also help you reap a significant ROI.
Whether your denomination is Catholic, Scientology, Presbyterian, or Latter Day Saints, VCT is a perfect floor for large auditoriums where you hold most of your sideline church functions.
Commercial Grade Laminate Flooring
Armstrong also is a leader in commercial laminate flooring. Those of you managing a church needing the look of hardwood will find this one of your best options.
For design flexibility and superior performance, Armstrong’s laminate flooring is the best in the industry. Not only can you gain the look of hardwood, you’ll also be able to create a convincing concrete or metal flooring with this option.
Those of you with older churches are perhaps planning a restoration to bring it back to its original luster. Even if most Catholic churches have a particular uniform appearance, you may want a more down-to-earth look for your local church.
Laminate flooring is an appropriate product for this scenario, especially because Armstrong offers a broad array of wood species. Despite being faux wood, even the most expert designer in your church won’t be able to tell the difference.
One great discovery with Armstrong is they add numerous branded features in their flooring products to enhance the enjoyment of the products. For instance, Commercial VisionGuard® is one laminate flooring feature that tells you about its exceptional durability for normal and heavy commercial applications.
Your particular denomination may have more popularity than ever, meaning something occurring in your church auditorium nearly every day. In some cases, this might involve fun church functions that involve a lot of footwork, food, and family activities.
Armstrong’s laminate flooring is guaranteed to have high resistance to wear-through, dents, stains, fading, and other damage. It even has moisture resistance thanks to its HydraCore™ Plus HDF infused core.
Underlayments on this floor provide an acoustic barrier as well, something very useful if the acoustics in your church are a bit cavernous. Sound control in a church is very important, whether giving sermons, or during church activities. No one wants to endure annoying sound when attending church services, particularly with crowds of people talking at once.
Carpet Tile
Using this type of flooring offers you a lot more customization to your church’s interior. When flooring colors become a major part of your church aesthetic, carpet tile is going to help express more creativity.
These tiles are also easy to install and are very inexpensive. This is the case with all of Armstrong flooring products, but you’ll find the same with two other carpet tile brands.
The two best brands for this type of flooring are Next Floor and Kraus.
With Next Floor, you’ll be able to enjoy various creative patterns in this tile to make your church stand out from others. Unlike regular carpet that you’d have to replace in totality when worn out, carpet tile only requires replacing the tile squares for easier maintenance.
Carpet tile from Next Floor and Kraus not only cost less than Shaw, Mohawk or Milliken Carpets but most of the comparable designs are actually better quality. Especially Kraus Flooring has made a huge effort to not only offering an affordable carpeting options for churches but developed ways to make installation easier than traditional methods. Want to see for yourself, take a look at the Kraus Armor Lock clip connector that makes installing carpet tiles a simple DIY project.
One of their best features is their ZipperLock Technology with dual bonding and interlocking tuft placement. If you have any experience with loop pile carpeting in your church, then you know it can easily unravel after experiencing heavy foot traffic. Kraus’s technology avoids this problem.
Price for Kraus carpet tile is only within the $1-$2 range per sq. ft. when you go through the right source. During times of tight church budgets, using this type of flooring should become a serious choice.
Above all, carpet tile is designed to withstand the most intense foot traffic and resistance to the most stubborn stains. Your church offices may receive more than their share of coffee stains or tracked in dirt. Next Floor or Kraus carpet tile will help keep it looking clean for well over a decade.
Most warranties run 10 years, giving you years of use before the floor shows any signs of wear.
Vinyl Plank Flooring
Going back to Armstrong for a different product, you can once again create a floor giving you the look of real hardwood. The bonus with vinyl plank flooring is that it’s super easy to install through a simple locking system. Gluedown methods are also available. It’s somewhat similar to how you’ve installed laminate flooring in your church.
When you buy vinyl plank flooring, the product comes in strips, giving the look of numerous wood styles from oak to hickory. For an old-world feel to your church, it’s going to become an ideal choice.
Another good reason for making this flooring your choice goes on the thought your Catholic church is maybe located in a flood zone. Using real hardwood would mean that if water ever permeates your church’s flooring, it’s likely to become ruined in hours.
Real hardwood is notorious for being impossible to replace. Any water permeating your vinyl plank flooring is easily fixed by replacing it with new Armstrong planks. Like most Armstrong floors, this type of flooring is resistant to water, as well as scratches and common stains.
Busy denominations like yours could use a floor like this without having to worry about how you’ll afford an upgrade or replacement.
The protection you’ll get from water is all the more important when you look back at Hurricane Harvey in the U.S. South. Churches in Houston, Texas were completely ruined from flooding, something that went beyond just replacing their floors.
Of course, plain old foot traffic alone quickly wears out real hardwood. So would colder weather if your church’s heating system isn’t the best.
Best of all, vinyl plank flooring is extremely affordable. Your church may not want to invest hundreds of dollars in real hardwood without having an assurance it’s going to hold up for a long time. When dealing with natural elements, it really won’t. Plus, maintenance on real wood would become more than you can probably handle.
Cleaning and maintenance on vinyl planks is extremely easy, making it simple to clean up after having an overly busy church function in your auditorium.
Using this flooring option does cost slightly more than the options above, but not by much. You can generally find vinyl plank flooring for between $2-$3 per sq. ft.
Luxury Vinyl Tile
As you can see, vinyl is an affordable option when it comes to flooring while providing the convincing look of real natural materials.
Using luxury vinyl tile (or LVT) is a good alternative to vinyl plank flooring if you want even more options in the look of your church floor. This provides not only an imitation hardwood, but also the look of stone.
You may have a rustic church that demands the look of stone, even though you don’t want to invest in the real thing. Just like hardwood, stone costs more than you probably want to spend on your flooring.
Armstrong is again your best choice for LVT flooring. They have two distinct sub-brands here: Luxe Plank™ and Vivero™.
Some of the natural options in Luxe Plank include exotic woods, natural stone and even concrete in plank form. Vivero offers much the same, including blended materials like stone and petrified wood.
No matter what denomination of church you manage, these materials are going to do much to bring a specific brand and character to your congregation. It may sound strange to think of branding working in a church. Regardless, the aesthetics of your church will do as much to attract new patrons as your sermons and social services do.
Diamond 10® Technology from Armstrong is at the heart of their LVT flooring to bring scratch, stain and wear resistance. Waterproofness will also prevent swelling, buckling, or lost integrity.
Using a peel-off backing, this flooring is very easy to install on your own. All you’ll need is a few hours of time to get it installed so it doesn’t interfere with Sunday services or weekday events.
No matter if you choose the interlocking system for installation or gluedown, you don’t really need an expert (or 100% prayer reliance) for a successful final result.
Even so, always analyze your church’s budget before you install. Remember that you have to consider the cost of disposing your prior floor, possible subfloor repairs, the cost of tools, and the cost in moving all your church furniture.
What Source Should You Use to Buy Your Flooring?
When you go on Armstrong’s website, you’ll find a lot of great information about the above flooring products. We offer the same at Floor City where you can buy all Armstrong flooring products (plus Kraus and Next Floor) at a discount.
Our service to churches of all denominations is ongoing to improve the churchgoing aesthetic.
You’ll find a lot of other sources providing flooring for churches. Few to any are going to save you considerable money, including offering the outstanding features Armstrong provides.
On our site, we work hard to help provide information your church can use to make the most educated flooring decision.
To order your floor, simply call us at (800) 898-9540. We’ll contact you soon after and direct you to the right place to pick up your order.
Whatever you do, don’t ignore the floor aesthetics of your church as a bigger part of your overall design. While churches like yours are sanctuaries to many needing life affirmation, the look of your floor will continue to put you in the forefront for paying attention to details.
