Kitchen flooring - advice and guidance needed

[livinginhope87]

Hello,

I need some help with kitchen flooring, we are looking to replace our kitchen floor into an extended living area. We are looking for something really hardwearing and easy to maintain. My son has a disability and so it needs to be able to cope with things being dropped on it. We are looking at Karndean and Amitico or a engineered wood but would love to hear real life experiences.
Thank you so much.

I'm in the process of exploring flooring options for my new home too. Karndean (LVT in general) is very good quality and if done properly comes with a long life guarantee (35 years I think). The only thing I found is that there is a lot of design choice with Karndean.

I'm not sure about engineered wood because it may not handle getting wet that well.

We put down slate recently. I love it. Just sweep and mop - easy peasy. We got it from a local reclaimation yard but it's brand new. It's cut into various sizes. We got 300 x 600 mm and laid it in an offset pattern. Love it 😊

Tough choices as dropping things frequently will bring obvious wear and tear. Wood dents, LVT can scratch, tiles chip... Suppose it depends on what's dropped.
Moving from one area to another can mean you need a 'break' if using tiles or there will be a crack formed over time. We had this when adding the extension and ended up digging out a whole room and screeding to the new extension floor all in one lump to avoid the break.

We have opted for bamboo flooring which is supposedly 2x tougher than oak flooring and looks the business :)

I used Colour Flooring Co for my kitchen. They have cork, rubber and vinyl flooring.

Thank you all! My DS struggles to hold thing well so it is normal toys or suchlike that are dropped, not with force. The kitchen and extension will be screeded together so we can avoid a break. I am worried I am going to spend a lot of money and it not really work for our lives. It's tricky isn't it! I think slate is even more likely to break. the colour flooring co looks interesting.

Look at Polyflor. They do LVT for commercial places such as restaurants. Much cheaper than Amtico.

Whatever you choose, please don't decide to throw away all the spare tiles by accident, like I did. I have managed to damage the floor twice, and we can't replace the tiles because they don't make them any more.

We have laminate with a 35 year warranty. Looks amazing but we recently dropped some plates and it has marked it. I would therefore avoid laminate and also times. Karndean would probably stand up better to dropping things but not if sharp edges

Thank you.

Cork tiles (like laminate, click system) soft and warm underfoot, things don't smash, not too pricey, and eco friendly too.

Karndean is probably your best bet. We had shop grade karndean in our old house. You need an experienced fitter though and it can be very pricey because the subfloor has to be perfect. This house has tiles because the subfloor was dreadful

Amtico here. Really like it.

Previous floor was limestone - needs a lot of care to look nice and high attrition rate on things that got dropped.

Previously had sheet vinyl which just didn’t look as polished and laminate which had issues after a dishwasher leak.

I’d get amtico again.

Went with Karndean here, it’s lovely. You can get full size samples sent (well before covid anyway). As pp say you need a perfect sub floor - which usually means 9mm plywood over the old flooring.

*where “old flooring” I mean bare floorboards, not vinyl etc!

Hi there’s a local company here that do a rubber type flooring that is laid like concrete so it’s seamless

Not sure what it’s called I’ll have alook

I have Amtico in my kitchen diner, utility and downstairs loo, been down 4 1/2 years and aside from a couple of dents where DS has dropped a ceramic plate, it still looks brand new.

Another vote for Karndean. We have had it in our kitchen for 5 years and it looks just like new. We have engineered wood in our hall and play room, that has not worn well. Lots of scratches, scuffs from sofa lees and other bits of furniture and some damage from pre housetrained puppies. We are replacing it with Karndean in Summer Oak as soon as the flooring place is open again.

We have Polyflor Expona Beveline in our kitchen and I love it. Warm under foot. Non slip. Easy to maintain and clean and things generally don't break if you drop them.

I am looking at lammett lvt. It is extremely hardwearing, its wear rating is very high.

lamett.eu/en/

We had Karndean Parquet fitted when we did building works lately. About £65 a square metre but looks great. A couple of tiles were badly fitted and they came straight back to fix them.

@MiniCooperLover Your kitchen is amazing! Can I ask where it's from please? I'm after a navy shaker with visible grain.

I think that's a DIY Kitchens one - the small unit behind the curved one on the left looks identical to ours, although ours is alabaster.

Hi there, ours is a Benchmarx Kitchen. It's called Midnight Blue from the Sherwood Shaker range and I do love it, but dust settles a lot into the grain and I find that quite annoying at times. The units came covered with plastic that the builders pulled off when finished and it did a weird whoosh and all the dust off the plastic backed sheets landed on the units and I've been cleaning them regularly ever since (finished at Christmas!). Other than that I do love it. Worktop is also Benchmarx and we may need to replace it at some point as it was fitted very badly and has bad joins.

Thank you all. I think we are going to go for Karndean. I think it is the right fit.