Laminate flooring made its presence felt in the South African building trade during the eighties and South Africans took to laminate flooring like fish to water. Of course back it was called Novilon. Every single house (well almost) that you steeped into either had just had laminate flooring installed or were about to have laminate flooring installed. It was like a scary laminate flooring plague that was sweeping through South Africa like wild fire an there did not appear to be any end to the laminate flooring disease.
One of the many oddities that surround the rise of laminate flooring is the fact that aside from ease of cleaning laminate flooring did not offer much else to the South African home maker. The patterns that laminate flooring were being released in were not exactly what one would call easy on the eye, in fact one would be forgiven for just calling the laminate flooring patterns ugly and gaudy, yet even this did not deter the fans of laminate flooring one bit, the demand for this new product just keep going up and up.
Then one day people seemed to collectively wake up and realise that laminate flooring in its current form it actually very ugly and should never have left the factory. When laminate flooring made its resurgence on the South African market years later it was as if the earlier foray had never occurred. Laminate flooring was now not just an attractive solution since you could have in just about any fancy surface type that you could think of.
Laminate flooring can now be had in granite or wooden finishes and while the new laminate flooring does offer the buyer a much more attractive solution to have a new floor laid, as soon as one steps onto the laminate flooring surface you are painfully aware that this is only an imitation and even though the people who install laminate flooring do offer to put extra padding underneath the laminate surface to give it a lush kind of bounce it still does not replace or rival that feeling of stepping onto a lovely oak floor.