If you are looking for a sturdy, modern, and easy-to-care floor covering, you will soon find stoneware rugs. Its properties make it a real alternative to natural stone tiles and panels, but also to parquet or carpet.
Read here what a floor covering consists of, what variants there are, how to place it and which binding agent you need.
What is a stone carpet?
No, stone rug is not a flooring woven from rock or mineral wool, but a special form of floor coating, but also for stairs, terraces or even walls.
It is a cast floor made of natural marble, mostly 2 to 8 millimetre marble or quartz pebbles, which are bonded with a colorless transparent binder. You can sort the stones according to color, mix them randomly or group them together and put them into specific shapes and patterns.
The possibilities are very diverse. Stone carpets with an open structure have many air-filled pores and, because of the gravel, an irregular surface, which gives you a pleasant and pleasant feeling when walking barefoot - just like carpet. As the room air circulates between the pebbles, stone carpets are warm unlike tiles. However, quartz pebbles are usually harder than steel and thus more resistant to abrasion than tile floors.
Some of you might know the stone rug principle of pattern-making: You cover an area with glue and sprinkle green-brown powder or small loose particles on it, which adheres to the glue and creates a beautiful natural surface. When laying a stone carpet, they are the same, but only more complex and the material used is gravel, which has already been mixed with a binding agent.
stone carpets installation ?
The bonding agent holds the individual stones together on the ground, and after drying, turns the initial liquid mass into an extremely hard and resistant surface. Last but not least, the correct ratio of material and epoxy or polyurethane (PU) resin, which depends on stone carpet thickness and grain size, determines the service life of stone carpet.
Which is better: epoxy resin or polyurethane as a binder for stone carpet?
Epoxy resin is a two-component adhesive. Polyurethane is UV resistant and lightweight, but more expensive than epoxy resin. Epoxy resin bonds set very well and have good price performance ratio, but are not UV stable and can be used in stone carpets outside as a floor covering yellow over time.
With special UV stabilizers this can be delayed, but not completely prevented. If you want to put a stone rug outside, you are using polyurethane as a binding agent. This should also be done indoors if the room has very large windows.
What are the characteristics that make the stone carpet special?
Whether subtle and harmonious, or cheerful and glamorous: when designing with stone carpets, there are hardly any desires that are not fulfilled due to the many possible colors, color combinations, or complementary patterns.
And the colors don't fade either, because the marble pebbles are naturally colored. Stone carpets just look great! Patterns and motifs are created with pebbles of a different color and pattern.
In addition, stone carpets also have very practical advantages over other floor coverings: since a stone carpet has such a screed, it uses a liquid on the substrate, it is a seamless floor and therefore easy to clean.
Dust and dirt are also bound between the pebbles due to the open and granular structure, making them invisible and above all, not hovering in the room air. The next time you vacuum or vacuum, you can simply remove the dirt particles. Stone carpet also reduces running noise and has better quality of impact sound insulation like laminate.
An overview of the advantages and disadvantages of stone carpets
Benefits:
- The floors are versatile and self-supporting
- Apply to old floors using appropriate primer
- Easy to care for and smooth
- Suitable for allergy sufferers
- Water resistant and also suitable for wet rooms such as bathrooms or showers. The additions make stone carpets non-slip.
- Slight contrast compensation
- Frost-proof and with a UV resistant binder also suitable for balconies
The disadvantage:
- Stone carpets are associated with higher costs.
- If you want to change the floor covering, the old stone carpets can only be removed with great difficulty.
- As with all floor coverings, appearance is a matter of taste.
What types of stone carpets are there?
In addition to the classic smooth-polished stone carpets, there are also prefabricated tiles in various dimensions or click stone rugs for balconies with integrated drainage.
This material is ideal for all spaces that need to be drained, such as terraces or porches. The tiles are laid floating on the floor, warm to the feet, slip resistant, can be used indoors and outdoors and have all the characteristics of a stone rug.
The tiles have two important advantages over the cast stone carpet: they can be walked on immediately and you can do it yourself