kitchen flooring - that old chestnut...

[macred]

I know it's been done many, many times, but please bear with me....

We are creating a kitchen-dining room, and are putting in underfloor heating. What are our options for flooring? Ideally we would like real wood, or engineered wood throughout, but am getting confused. Depending on who I speak to, you can or can't put real wood on underfloor heating. And opinions also vary about whether you can put engineered wood in a kitchen (or indeed real wood).

Am not keen on laminate, have looked a lots of bamboo samples and not keen on them either.

Are we therefore going to have to compromise and go for tiles/vinyl/lino in the kitchen section of the room, and engineered wood elsewhere????

Thank you for any help and advice - am going quietly insane.....

You want to speak to a company that sell the both as will get a real answer.

www.thesolidwoodflooringcompany.com/Wood-Flooring-for-Underfloor-Heating-tc-66.html like these

but any wood flooring will be ok for the kitchen area

real wood flooring will shrink, making gaps between the boards, as it dries out, and is more likely to crack than engineered flooring

Does that happen anyway or just when there's underfloor heating piglet?

You can have engineered wood in a kitchen; just make sure any spills are dealt with promptly. We had this in our kitchen-diner and it survived several years of abuse.

Engineered flooring is a fancy version of plywood. Due to its construction it is dimensionally stable and does not shrink or expand much with changes in moisture content.

Solid wood will shrink and expand across its width and thickness (but not its length) with changes in moisture content. UFL makes the flooring very dry and it will shrink a lot. This will enlarge the gaps betweeen boards and/or at the edges of the room, depending on method of fixing, and may also make the boards warp or "cup" so that the edges of each board rise up (or the centre of some boards may come up in a dome), and depending on method of fixing, boards may crack longitudinally.

Without UFH, solid wood will expand (in a heated house, usually in summer) and shrink (in a heated house, usually in winter*) with changes in humidity. However if the boards are acclimatised in the room before fixing, and are sensibly fixed, the change in size will not be severe enough to cause problems if there is no UFH. You may have noticed in old houses that there is often a wide gap between floorboards (especially if central heating was added after they were built). Modern floorboards are tongued and grooved to prevent the gaps showing and letting draughts up, or objects such as coins being able to fall down the gap.

*unheated structures such as garden sheds are usually damper in winter, so their floors will swell in winter and shrink when they dry out in summer.

We're having Karndean..looks just like wood...honest...

Thanks piglet. Very useful.

We've had engineered wooden flooring in our kitchen for approx 6 years now and it's still looking good. We don't have underfloor heating though so I couldn't comment on that though. As someone else said, you do need to pay attention to mopping up spills fairly quickly but then hopefully you would anyway!!

Am I the only one that gets intermittent washing machine spillage? (where the machine thinks the door is shut, but there is a stringy bit of clothing hanging out and allowing leaks, so while I go off for an hour to mumsnet clean the house a big puddle appears on the kitchen floor?

We've got (cheaper) equivalent of Karndean and seems to be good so far, early days though. Hated the engineered wook in our old place. Washing machine leaked slowly over time without us noticing so didn't get to it quickly enough. Resulted in a large patch of floor getting stained. Not a good look.

I love my karndean - looks like wood except when you look carefully in bright light. And it is SO easy to clean. Warm underfoot too, though not the loveliness of real wood to the touch. If I didn't have kids or a door to the garden in the kitchen, I might have considered wood, but ease won out.

This is all extremely useful, and makes things a lot clearer.

Heartening to hear stories of engineered wood in kitchens (rulebreakers!). Will look again at that, and also at Karndean.

So thank you. I feel calmer and better informed!