Underfoot covering vital
New flooring can be an excellent means of giving your kitchen a new look. The choices for kitchen flooring are almost endless, depending on what best suits your sense of style and your pocketbook.
Upkeep and lasting quality are most influential factors that determine what ends up underfoot in the kitchen.
When it comes to wear and tear around a house, few finishes are subject to the kind of beating that a kitchen floor must withstand. Endless traffic from appliance to appliance, falling food and the occasional table scrap slipped to the dog are just a few of the day-to-day events that can give a kitchen floor a real run for its money.
Shopping for new kitchen flooring can be a chore. Most people begin by searching for a product that they’ve seen in a showroom, a model home or decorating magazine. Not a bad place to begin as long as you realize that these floors are generally viewed under the best of circumstances without “real life” conditions. For example, the flooring needs for a growing family with children and pets are substantially different than those of a couple of pet-free emptynesters.
Take a serious look at your lifestyle before choosing new kitchen flooring.
More than ever, consumers are looking for the best of all worlds – a floor that looks good, doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, is easy to maintain and will last forever. When you find it, let us know because we’ve yet to discover such a finish.
All things considered, the product that offers the best bang for the kitchen-flooring dollar is sheet vinyl. It is kid- and pet-friendly and “no-wax” sheet vinyl is among the easiest to maintain.
As is the case with most building products, there are good, better and best levels of quality from which to choose and flooring is no exception.
Cushion vinyl might sound plush, but its paper backing and embossed-pattern construction place it at the bottom of the quality totem pole. It is especially susceptible to tears and gouges from high heels and the occasionally dropped kitchen knife. Keep in mind that the majority of the cost associated with the typical vinyl kitchen floor is installation labor.
Therefore, if sheet vinyl makes the final cut for your kitchen, choose an inlaid or vinyl-backed product which will be more expensive upfront, but you’ll spend less over the long haul.
Vinyl tiles are an especially popular finish in “retro”-style kitchens, with thought given to both color and pattern and installed with the appropriate adhesive. Don’t confuse these with the cheap peel-n-stick tiles that are best left in their boxes.
Floating floors continue to grow in popularity as an option. As the name implies, a floating floor is neither nailed nor glued to the substrate. Instead, the material – planks or tiles – is installed over a foam pad. Most floating floor styles consist of tongue and groove construction for easy do-it-yourself assembly.
Some products require the individual pieces be glued together while others offer glueless assembly.
Although a floating floor can be installed over a wood subfloor, they are particularly popular over a concrete slab due to their ability to “give.” Though touted by some manufacturers as “indestructible,” a floating floor – plastic or wood – can be scratched or gouged, which could mean selective replacement, which is neither easy nor cheap. And unlike its hardwood counterpart, blemishes can’t be filled, sanded or finished.
Natural wood flooring still ranks as one of the most popular finishes for a kitchen floor. It is warm, durable and easy to keep clean and is available in a host of colors, patterns and finishes. As with a floating floor, wood and water don’t mix. Therefore, you can end up spending a pretty penny to repair damage resulting from a leaking dishwasher or defrosting freezer. One advantage that solid wood flooring has over its engineered counterpart is that it can be sanded and finished many times where the engineered products veneer will withstand only finite refinishing.
When it comes to abrasion resistance and design possibilities, it’s hard to beat tile. Tile is an especially popular choice over a concrete slab due to the stable base that it provides. By the same token, floor tile can be the object of cracks and chips from shifting foundations and/or the occasional falling pot or pan. An increasingly popular finish for people with concrete floors is an acid stain finish. Acid stain is not a paint or coating. Rather, it’s a coloring process made with water, acid and inorganic salts, which react with minerals present in the concrete.