Is the hardwood floor durable enough to lay it in the kitchen area?
Have any of you had experience installing hardwood flooring in the kitchen? We are currently planning our home, which has an open kitchen, dining room and living room. For visual reasons, we would like to put the same parquet everywhere, but we doubt it would be durable enough in the cooking area. We're not too picky, but we also don't want to tear out the entire floor in 10 years.
Answers
We had 11 years of oiled and brushed wenge in the kitchen, now oak, hand planed, oiled in the new house. Intense cooking is going on. No problem.
My parents built the house in 1984, the hardwood floor is still in the kitchen. Of course, over time it does get patina on it (it gets a little darker), definitely more so than in the living room, for example. They wax the floor once a year and may have already cleaned it once, I'm not sure.
We've had hardwood flooring everywhere here for 2 years now, and we're going to do the same thing in the new building with solid wood flooring, as visually I don't really like the transitions between stone and wood. Sure, wood is softer than stone and you can still get a dent, but stone tends to flatten out and everything shatters when dropped.
I use PRO wood everywhere, and I would put it even in the bathroom!
We also have oiled oak in the kitchen. As with tile in the apartment, I immediately wipe up with a damp cloth anything that has fallen or splattered. We haven't had a single stain yet, despite colorful sauces, leftover vegetables, etc. – all the stuff that flies around during cooking. No worries.
The trick is to get the floors oiled and really oil them regularly. In our house, hot water for pasta or tomato sauce dutifully forms droplets on the oil. Nothing gets absorbed. You wipe it off and that's it.
Of course, if you don't take maintenance so seriously, it looks different. But nothing soaks into a properly oiled floor so quickly.
We too have hardwood flooring in the kitchen, but we have waxed(!) carpet in the "stressed" areas (in front of the stove and sink)... it's not as tragic if something goes wrong...
Unfortunately, I don't have any long term experience yet, as I only moved in last year.
In my old apartment with parquet as my kitchen floor. Once I dropped a pot on the tiled kitchen floor. The tile was badly damaged. I don't think it would have looked so tragic if the floor was parquet.
Our rental apartment has hardwood flooring everywhere, including the kitchen. Here you can clearly see the wear and tear after two years, even though we treat it with care. Water (or kids with water) is the last enemy, everything else we can clean up as "signs of life." We also have carpet, which helps.
