Week 36 of the build has seen the start of the preparation to lay the Altro Safety Flooring . You might remember reading a few weeks ago that Altro Safety Flooring became one of our partners to showcase their non slip vinyl flooring product in all of the wet areas. We are using a new product from Altro call Suprema . The Altro Safety Flooring product is extensively used throughout Australia in commercial and institutional applications. However Suprema  does not have the same “sparkle” look which is common to safety flooring. This subtle understatement makes Altro Suprema better suited to domestic applications. Safety flooring is now increasingly being used in domestic situations as more people realise that falls in wet areas of the home are a significant contributor to household accidents. This is particularly the case where you have owners or visitors that are not as stable on their feet due to age or disability.

The first part of the process for installing the Altro Safety Flooring is to prepare the surface. The surface needs to have less than 3 mm variance across the area to be laid. We were able to get our tolerances to within 1 mm.  The process then requires a primer to be applied, reinforcing in the interfaces between the walls and the floors. (This is because the flooring coves up the wall, in our case about 200mm.) And then a waterproof membrane is applied. You can see the process in the following 3 photographs.

The blue in the first photo is the primer and you can see the reinforcing fibreglass tape on the interface between the walls and the floor. You can also see that the Altro Safety Flooring continues into the shower cubicle. (on the right of the Stormtech grate drain) This way we get a completely sill-less entry into the showers. In the second photo you can see that the green polyurethane waterproofing membrane has been applied. All of this will be left to thoroughly dry before the Altro Safety Flooring is laid. The vinyl flooring comes in rolls that are 2 metres in width and these are welded together on-site forming a completely water impervious continuous layer in all of the wet areas of the house. I will be posting further details next week when the Altro Safety Flooring is laid.