Kitchen Flooring 101: Facts Behind the Best Materials for Kitchen Floors

Remodeling your kitchen can be a costly affair and around four percent of the entire budget on the average would be taken up by the cost of flooring materials. If you decide to keep the same flooring that you currently have, you would still need to save a little extra from your budget to rehabilitate the floor into shape because of all the stressful effects that a major build-up may have on it.

Essentially, choosing light-colored flooring materials of any variety creates this illusion and gives you the impression of a larger room. The same effect is achieved by diagonally arranging floor tiles when installing it instead of laying it in such a way that it's parallel to the walls. Each different kitchen style has a suitable type of flooring that would look good on it.

For example, using floor tiles measuring 12x12" and above is perfect for minimizing grout lines and work best for contemporary kitchens. Choose smaller tiles if ever you're working on a traditional kitchen. These are the same sizes you would need when you design patterns or create borders on your floor.

Wooden kitchen flooring materials still remain as one of the most popular choices given the much sought after qualities that it possesses such as its warmth, unbelievable resilience and smooth, natural surface. Using hardwood tiles or slabs for your kitchen floor would assure you of its sturdiness and timeless charm that gets even better with age. It's clearly one of the many materials that never go out of style and is quite easy to integrate and complement with almost any particular type of kitchen décor you may have in mind.

There are literally countless species of hard wood that are basically used in creating floor tiles and floor building materials; each with certain qualities that complement a particular kitchen style or design. For example, the distinct grainy surface of rustic oak makes it a popular flooring material for country or traditional kitchen designs. Maple and cherry wood are chosen for its vibrantly elegant look and feel. A sleek and modern look is achieved when ash, birch and beech wood is used. Some of the other fine alternatives used are teak, pecan, mahogany, walnut and hickory.

There are several classes of hardwood flooring. They come in plank, tile, strip, and parquet forms with the particular qualities of each are described in more detail below.

Wooden Plank Flooring are basically made up of wooden boards that are about three-quarters of an inch thick and is roughly around three to seven inches in width and reaches an overall length of about eight feet. They perfectly display the remarkable wood grain that completes that traditional kitchen look.