Working with Linoleum Flooring

By: Cynthia Sanz, This Old House magazine (Page 1 of 3)

Joe Yutkins

Sheet linoleum with a custom inlaid border covers the mudroom floor of the 1993 This Old House project house, a 1906 Shingle Style in Belmont, Massachusetts. Six years later, Tom Silva says, "There's not a sign of wear anywhere. It looks just like the day it was installed.

Tom Silva installing a linoleum floor with a border stripe

Joe Yutkins

Tom Silva demonstrates how he uses a hard-rubber J-roller to press down the seams of a border stripe, which is inlaid into a sheet of linoleum.

To turn liquid linseed oil into a floor covering durable enough to withstand decades of shoe scuffs and dog toenails, linoleum manufacturers still follow Frederick Walton's original recipe: Stir melted tree resin into a tank of boiled linseed oil heated to 175 degrees Fahrenheit. Alternately heat and cool the tank until its contents turn into a sticky viscous paste called linoleum cement. Extrude in a thick pastalike strand, then cut, cool, and store in chalk-dusted iron boxes. Blend the dry ingredients — wood flour, powdered cork, pigments, and powdered limestone—and mix with the linoleum cement in a series of double-screw extruders, or "sausage makers." Heat this mixture; then feed into the calenders, pairs of powerful rollers that flatten the raw linoleum onto a jute backing and create the desired pattern. Now hang the sheets, each about 5 miles long, in a 160-to-195-degree seasoning room, and wait two to four weeks for them to toughen. Finally, seal the porous surface with an acrylic finish.

Joe Yutkins

Linoleum spans the color spectrum. One company makes sheets and tile in 147 different shades, both marbled and solid.

Joe Yutkins

Armstrong touted linoleum's ease of care in a 1943 advertisment.

Joe Yutkins

In 1877, fourteen years after his patent on linoleum flooring, Frederick Walton used essentially the same ingredients to come up with a durable wallcovering stuck to a paper backing. Called Lincrusta, its heavy, crisply embossed rolls and panels found a place in many middle-class houses both as faux-plaster friezes, insert, and as highly decorative dadoes. The British manufacturer still uses the original brass and iron rollers to create the elaborate patterns—from restrained Regency swags to florid Victorian foliage. Lincrusta goes up like wallpaper but requires special care because of its weight and thickness. Once up, it also needs two coats of oil-based paint to seal the surface and disguise the seams.

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For linoleum makers, it's something of a bittersweet joke: A man walks into a flooring store and says he wants to buy linoleum for his kitchen. No problem, says the store clerk. Over here we have all kinds of vinyl flooring.

"It's amazing," says Frank O'Neill, publisher of Floor Focus magazine. "Even dealers you'd think would know better use vinyl and linoleum interchangeably." In truth, the two couldn't be more different. Where vinyl flooring is a synthetic product made of chlorinated petrochemicals, linoleum is produced from all-natural ingredients. Where vinyl will melt if a lighted match or cigarette lands on it, linoleum can't. And where most vinyl patterns are printed into the surface, linoleum's colors go all the way through. "As linoleum wears, different layers of color are gradually revealed," says Duo Dickinson, an architect in Madison, Connecticut, who has also used the material on backsplashes and countertops. "It can be quite beautiful." Durability is another of linoleum's attributes; some floors have survived 30 to 40 years in tough commercial environments. "It seems to last forever," Dickinson says.

Amazingly, linoleum's makeup and manufacture have hardly changed since an Englishman named Frederick Walton patented the product in 1863. The story goes that he got the idea from the leathery skin of oxidized linseed oil that forms on paint. Walton eventually perfected a mix of linseed oil, cork dust, wood flour, tree resins, ground limestone, and pigments — the same recipe used by linoleum makers today — and figured out how to press it onto a jute backing. Then he gave his concoction its name, combining the Latin words for flax (linum), the source of linseed oil, and oil (oleum).

Made in sheets, tiles, or even decorative area "rugs" and stuck to the floor with adhesive, linoleum became a favorite floor covering in stores, restaurants, and kitchens, where its smooth, water-resistant surface made cleaning less of a chore. But, when cheaper vinyl flooring became available in 1947, people began turning away from drab, old-fashioned linoleum. Says Frank O'Neill: "Frankly, it looked pretty lousy."

But now linoleum is surging back. The Dutch linoleum maker Forbo Industries, which holds 90 percent of the $40 million U.S. linoleum market, has seen sales jump by more than 30 percent over the last two years. Domco, a Canadian maker of vinyl flooring, plunged into linoleum in 1997 in response to requests from architects and specifiers. That same year, in what many see as the surest sign of linoleum's renewed popularity, vinyl-flooring giant Armstrong bought the world's second-largest linoleum maker, DLW (Deutsche Linoleum Werke), reentering a market it had left for dead in the 1970s.

Why the renewed interest? Color, for one thing. Today, linoleum comes in a Crayola box of vibrant hues, a far cry from the muddy offerings available before World War II. And new factory-applied sealer coats protect those colors against dirt and stains.

No matter what its color, a growing number of architects and designers regard linoleum as "green," environmentally friendly flooring. "From a resource standpoint, it's great," says Environmental Building News editor Alex Wilson, who last year installed a linoleum floor in the kitchen and bath area at the newsletter's offices in Brattleboro, Vermont. "It's made from natural, largely renewable, materials, and there are no environmental toxins involved in its manufacturing or disposal."

It's also a natural choice for vintage houses. Dean and Lauren Gallant — owners of a 93-year-old house in Belmont, Massachusetts, that This Old House renovated in 1993 — put linoleum in their laundry room, mudroom, and one of the bathrooms. "The original butler's pantry had it, and it was still in reasonably good shape," says Dean Gallant. "So we said, 'Well, if it lasted that long, why not do it again?'"