thinking about an Oak floor in my new kitchen....advice please!

[pashmina]

I have considered absolutely everything - Karndean, Amtico, Ceramic tiles, Slate - real and fake...and I keep coming back to wanting Oak - but just how practical is it? My kitchen will also include open plan dining area and family room which will be quite sunny, so I thought that with wood any fading could just be re-sanded and re-varnished over the years???

We have it it is fab
You can maintain it too, ours is waxed not sealed

I am getting oak for our new dining room - considered it for the kitchen as well but I was a bit worried about mopping it.

We have oak throughout downstairs of house except for kitchen.

Plus: it is warm to touch, looks fantastic, and things don't break so much when they fall on it (unlike our slate kitchen floor). Minus: you can't do heavy-duty mopping, and it does get scratched eventually but you just get it re-sanded every few years.

we have just had it laid throughout downstairs.

• you can easily clean up spills

• it gets dusty easy, plastic kids toys scratch it and dent it.

And ours has risen in the heat.

It does look fab though!

did you look at the oak Amtico? It looks really good - I saw some on the floor in a shop yesterday and was quite taken with it.

Is real oak more expensive than Amtico?

We have oak throughout (except kitchen) but now wish we had it put in there also.

Easy to keep clean, warm underfoot, and doesn't soak up spills (my DD is potty training so had plenty of trials)....

It does scratch easily though but as someone else suggested we can get it rubbed down.

We bought ours from Jewsons, Solid Oak Rustic. Got a very good price I think about £35 m2. We were expecting to pay much more for real oak.

what happened if your washing machine get flooded?

A neighbour has oak throughout her downstairs and it's utterly beautiful. She lets children scoot through the house (though she said she'd stop them when/if she gets gravel laid anywhere in the garden or drive) and the floor still looks fine. They had a slow leak in the downstairs loo and the wood buckled up, but once they fixed the leak the wood dried and shrank back again, and you cannot see where it was. The one thing she regrets is not having had underfloor heating installed at the same time.

my mind is made up - oak it is...just need to find the right supplier now!

my mind is made up - oak it is...just need to find the right supplier now!

We were advised(imo after we had bought our floor!) to buy it from a supplier that will also fit it. This prevents any ' its not the wood its the fitter and its not the fitter its the wood' type problems should anything go wrong with it.

For example we bought ours and had it laid and now its rising, the fitter is claiming its the quality of the wood and the wood company state theres nothing wrong with it. If we had the wood supplied and fitted by the same company they would have to claim responsibility.