As a professional member of the American Institute of Building Designers and a Certified Green Professional, Kevin Holdridge is versed in all areas of custom home remodels and designs. In this article, the owner of KDH Residential Designs in Charlotte, North Carolina, explains what to look for when choosing a new flooring system in your kitchen.
The type of flooring you decide to put down in your kitchen should have everything to do with how you live on a day-to-day basis. Do you cook every day, or do you eat out most of the time? You have to be honest with yourself about how you really live before you can determine the right flooring to go with in a kitchen remodel.
If you are someone who orders pizza a lot, for example, or if your family typically just sits down in the breakfast room and eats Chinese food takeout for dinner most nights, then the specific type of flooring you choose in your kitchen is probably not that big of a deal. In those cases, you can probably just go with whatever type you think looks best and is in your price range. A nice hardwood floor, for example, would be a great choice for someone who might not do a ton of cooking in his kitchen.
If you are someone who spends a lot of time cooking meals day in and day out in your kitchen, however, then a hardwood floor might end up being a little too hard for your comfort. In those cases, a person might want to go with a flooring style that will be a little softer to stand on and easier to clean if something spills. A cork floor is a flooring type that is great for people who cook a lot because it is easy to maintain and soft to stand on for long periods of time.
The main thing you should be looking for, if you are someone who really enjoys cooking a lot, is some type of flooring that will give a little bit and won’t be quite as hard on your legs if you are going to be standing for long periods of time.
If cost is a consideration when talking about flooring system and you are working on designing a kitchen in a newly built home, then I would encourage people to keep that in mind when creating the floor plan as a whole. By keeping the house and therefore the kitchen as square and stacked as possible, you will save some money on flooring by not wasting material on nooks and crannies.
For instance, installing a new kitchen floor in a brick Georgian-style home will probably be a lot cheaper than installing a kitchen floor in a big English Tudor house which has lot of steeply pitched roofs that jot in and out.
If you were to build a completely rectangular house with a simple roof, like a brick Georgian home that might just have three simple dormers on top, then you will not need to eat up a lot of extra corners and odd angles and things like that. So in turn, that will save money on flooring costs when it comes to both materials and installation.
If you are looking to remodel your kitchen and choose a new flooring, I would definitely recommend that you determine exactly what you use your kitchen for most often and how often you like to cook. The answers to those questions will determine the best type of flooring to suit your needs.
