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Terrazzo… A Hidden Treasure
Have you ever removed an old carpet or maybe tore up some old vinyl seamless or tile flooring and discovered some colorful, dirty old cement mosaic flooring beneath it? Rather than search for some material to recover this unsightly mess, you may very well be able to repair that dirty, stained, pitted or otherwise mangled Terrazzo flooring.
Arcadian Flooring Company specializes in refurbishing and repairing old terrazzo floors. Southern California is filled with homes and buildings that installed terrazzo floors and walls during the original construction because terrazzo offered, and still does, a beautiful and durable flooring system. Over the years and as architectural styles and trends changed, many of these floors were covered with carpet, tiles, hardwood floors or other flooring materials. In recent years we have seen resurgence in the use of terrazzo as not only a beautiful marble flooring option sought by many designers and architects, but a long lasting resilient choice for both residential and commercial use.
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Living The Art Of Terrazzo
Written by Terrazzo Artist Michael C. Menegazzi
Terrazzo can be described "primarily" as a masonry trade. It is made of crushed marble chips usually mixed with cement as a binding matrix. This marble aggregate allows for a wide variety of color choices in the finished product. The cement also may be colored with pigment thus creating and truly infinite variety of color combinations. The design work using these various color and combinations is limitless and using brass or zinc divider strips to separate colors creates that "rich, old world look," for which Terrazzo is best known.
I say "primarily" a masonry trade because at its core it is exactly that, but Terrazzo is much more than this. In fact it can also be described as an artisan craft in and of itself much like hand-carved furniture is considered.
The Terrazzo "masonry-artisan" or journeyman (as he called in the trade) manufacturer's Terrazzo entirely on the job site. Not only is the Terrazzo worker responsible for flat, straight, plumb, true, permanent, and/or durable surfaces like a marble installer, tile installer or even a cement mason; he also creates the color, the composite integrity and the uniformity of the product. Finally, when the Terrazzo is ground and polished, he is responsible for the finish as well.....(more)
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