What do you have on your kitchen floor?

[MrsCurly]

We're moving house and putting in a new kitchen but are very puzzled about what kind of floor to put down.

Need something durable and easily cleaned -as well as the usual muck from the kids at mealtimes, the kitchen leads straight on to the garden so will get extra dirty.

We've looked at lots of tiles and even slate but worry it's too hard. Hard on your feet if you're standing a long time. Hard for kids if they fall. Hard if you drop something.

Our current kitchen floor is laminate but has aged really badly and looks cheap and shoddy. We've looked at some pricier laminate but it's very expensive. Twice as much as slate.

So, appologies for being so boring, but please, what do you have on your kitchen floor and what would you reccommend?!

TricityBendix, my inherited oven has your name on it

we have oak flooring in our kitchen (only laid last week), it looks really nice, but not sure how durable it will be (or, more importantly, how much the dirt shows up).

In our last kitchen we had limestone tiles and I hated them. They showed up every bit of dirt and needed mopping about 16 times a day. Also they cracked, and were cold. and when I dropped a le creuset pan on them, it cracked.

Well Clara, that's because I'm truly fabulous at baking cakes!!!

( Or maybe not. )

quarry tiles, easy to clean, don't tend to drop things so not sure if things get smashed, i thought they would be cold, but they're really nice underfoot

Lovely porcelain tiles (just laid a few weeks ago, so I'm loving them).I always have something on my feet so the cold won't bother me, and we chose tiles that won't show every grain of dirt, so hopefully not too much mopping!!

Am very aware they're unkind to dropped items though and am dreading the first breakage!

We have terracotta tiling due to the fact that DH's special effect is ceramic tiling.

I would love it in my dining room, but you simply have to take up the floorboards or put something down and DH is very particular.

For the rest of the house we have floorboards covered in some shite to stop the draughts... erm it's that stuff which is shiny on one side and looks like hessian on the other. It's temporary?????

In our sitting room we have oak flooring, which is 'cheap text' for oak veneered laminate because I wouldn't have another Christmas without a floor in there.

We have tiles but we'll change for Karndean (a cheaper version of Amtico) as soon as we can afford it. We have the strips, jsut the workmanship still needed.

sex

lol - I was thinking cat tray, bottles for re-cycle, table, chairs, some shoes by back door. Dust pan and brush and bin.

but you probably want to know .....

panel flooring, I wanted something warmer than tiles.

we have a rubber floor
it's fab - also leads out into garden

drifts of dog hair
crisps bits of breadsticks
toy cars

We have tiles, inherited with the house, no idea what they're made of. The previous owner was very proud of them - expensive and imported from Italy, apparently. Hideous 'busy' pattern on them.

They are a nightmare. If you drop anything it shatters into a million pieces which disperse over a surprisingly wide area. When ds falls over it really hurts. And when he bangs things on it (pans, pan lids, colanders etc) it makes the most awful din!

As and when we redo the kitchen I'd go for rubber flooring. Had it in our old bathroom and it was fantastic.

We have laminate over all the downstairs floors and tiles in our hall. If I was doing it again then I would have some kind of tile in the kitchen or maybe marmoleum (which is naturally antibacterial) or dalsouple flooring.

Bloody wood which the previous owners assured us had been "treated" but which is now stained and dried out in patches. It's an open-plan living-dining-kitchen btw.