Kitchen Wood Flooring

If you’re in search of wood flooring for your kitchen, it’s important that you take into consideration what a tough environment kitchens can be when it comes to wood. Wood is a natural material, and reacts to changes in temperature and humidity by expanding and contracting. Extreme and rapid cases of expansion and contraction can cause havoc with wooden floors. Add to this, spills, grease and high traffic around your work triangle and you’ll start to see there’s more than just good looks to take into account when choosing a wooden floor for your kitchen.

Without a doubt, engineered wood flooring is more suitable for a kitchen environment than solid wood. Solid wood flooring is made up of planks of one single species of wood and nothing else. While solid wood flooring will remain perfectly stable in many rooms in the home, the kitchen is not one of them. The changes in temperature caused by ovens and hobs can cause solid wooden flooring to buckle and warp because it expands so much when the kitchen is “in action” and then cause gaps to develop when the kitchen temperature returns to normal.

It is for these reasons that engineered wood flooring, which is a much more stable flooring option, is more suitable. So why is engineered wood flooring more stable? It is more stable because it is a man made construction, designed with maximum stability in mind. It is made up of layers of different types of wood, which are bonded together and then topped with a solid wood lamella or top layer. Because of its top layer, it looks just like solid wood, but because of the construction of its under layer, it will not expand and contract like solid wood, making it the ideal choice for your kitchen.