Choosing the Right LVT for Your Project

With LVT you can have it all: aesthetics, performance, low maintenance, and long life-cycle. With so many reasons to love luxury vinyl tile (LVT), it is becoming the product of choice for commercial spaces ranging from retail, healthcare and education to hospitality and office. And while some LVTs are tailor-made for commercial use, others are geared for homeowners. How to make sense of the thousands of options, let alone which may be the best solution for your project? Your Starnet member has the expertise to help you navigate the world of LVT.

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Universal Metro: Best Practices – June 2014

By Sonya Jennings

Grant Petruzzelli, David Triepke, Dave Sprenger, Payam Riazati
Universal Metro, a commercial flooring contractor located in Santa Fe Springs, California, has been serving the Los Angeles metro area for 30 years. The firm’s main focus is on the healthcare market, along with tenant improvement, corporate office, education, hospitality and government. Owner and CEO Dave Triepke attributes his success in the highly competitive Los Angeles market to a handful of key strategies, including strong partnerships, shrewd capitalization procedures, and a commitment to hiring and retaining the best employees.

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Preparing Sub-Floor Slabs That Have Been Submerged for a New Flooring System

Mother Nature holds nothing back when it comes to storms. It can sometimes take years for people to recover from hurricanes and tropical storms and the resulting flooding. Some of the most difficult installation challenges arise in the wake of natural disasters. And when water is present, these projects must be approached carefully and systematically. If not, subsequent failure is highly likely.

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Access Flexibility with Raised Access Flooring

Access floors have come of age. In the 1960’s, raised access floors were a necessary evil for main frame computer rooms. These spaces needed a flexible flooring system for wire and cable management, and the natural plenum created under the floor was also used to distribute air to cool computers and other equipment. The floors were more functional than attractive, unless you loved the industrial look. Today, the “information generation” demands connectivity everywhere in the workspace and the flooring industry has responded with access floors that have more benefits, versatility, options and better aesthetics. The new generation of access floors contributes to high performance building designs because the floors integrate features ranging from efficient HVAC distribution at occupant level to modular plug-and-play systems located at individual work stations. This Starlog showcases access flooring — the innovative choice for office, medical, education, high-tech and historical buildings.

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Pre-Installation Checklists Ensure a Trouble-Free Floor Installation

“Be prepared” is not just a Boy Scout motto. Being prepared for a floor installation project is the best way to ensure your project will flow smoothly and with the least amount of disruption to the overall construction schedule. It seems simple enough, but it’s easy to overlook a critical task if you’re not aware of what it is, why it’s important, when to do it and who is is responsible for getting it done. This Starlog provides an overview of some important pre-installation checklist items you can use to “be prepared” for your next flooring project.

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Exceptional Relationships. Selecting, Working With and Getting the Most From Your Vendor Partners

In a strong economy, it’s easy to justify using quality products and networking with top-notch vendors on every aspect of the job. This is even more important in a down or recovering market. High performance products manufactured by leading brands and installed by established professionals ALWAYS pays off in the long run. On the other hand, partnering with underperformers, be they products or service providers, can turn your project into a disaster and haunt your career for life. Why risk it? Starnet members don’t. This Starlog provides insight into our vendor partner relationships and how that translates into helping us help you.

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Carpet 101

What are some of the performance components that make carpet perform well? Although you needn’t be an expert on all carpet matters, a basic understanding of construction will help you choose a carpet that meets the physical and aesthetic needs of your space. Plus, a working knowledge about construction will help everyone on the project — manufacturers, designers, contractors and end users — ensure that the carpet delivers on everyone’s expectations.

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Advice for Avoiding Construction Pitfalls

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens opens with, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This story could be a parable for today’s business climate. The pressure to cut a corner here or there to stay profitable, or to find creative ways to get more work done with fewer people, is testing the mettle of many companies. Knowing this, it is more important than ever to be on the lookout for pitfalls that can derail your flooring project. You can’t foresee every possible construction predicament, but you can, as the Dickens classic concludes, do a “far, far better thing” for your flooring projects by focusing on a few key areas.

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Floor Preparation Estimates

A flooring contractor can provide a ballpark estimate during a project’s specification stage. But providing a hard quote for the actual cost is like predicting the score of a game when the first pitch is thrown. Sure, player stats and team standings may be good indicators, but how any one game plays out can leave us in suspense until the bottom of the ninth. And so it is with floor preparation estimates. Every job is unique. Even with the benefit of a long experience curve, estimating involves a bit of a guestimating until the job is actually underway. This issue of Starlog will focus on subfloor preparation issues and floor installation estimates, which go together hand-in-glove.

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