How To Choose The Best Tile For Your Kitchen Floor
It’s easy to understand why the kitchen is among the top areas of the home to renovate. The old adage, “The kitchen is the heart of the home,” proves true throughout the ages. The kitchen is the place where memories are made, stomachs are filled, and family joy is experienced. It’s no wonder that people want to update their kitchens to be more aesthetic, modern, and useful.
So, here you are. You’re finally renovating, or simply upgrading, your kitchen. It’s a huge and exciting endeavor, providing your home with incredible value and a lifetime’s worth of memories and joy.
Choosing Flooring for the Kitchen
If one of the areas of renovation is your kitchen floor, you’re sure to be lost in the world of flooring. There are so many flooring options to choose from, it can be difficult to pick the one that is best for your kitchen. When you are deciding what type of flooring you want, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
The first thing to consider is the entire cost of your kitchen renovation project. Kitchen renovations are notoriously expensive, usually costing into the tens of thousands of dollars. Before you get started on your renovation, you will want to determine your budget for the whole project.
Once you know your project budget, you will be able to narrow down your costs for each specific area. Determining the price you can pay for your flooring will help you in choosing the type that you want.
The next thing to keep in mind is the durability of your flooring. The kitchen is a frequented area, one of the most, if not the most, busy areas of the house. You want a floor that is going to hold up and have a long life, not a floor that is going to require a ton of difficult maintenance, just to need replacement in ten years.
With those things in mind, you will discover that using tile as flooring in your kitchen makes sense. It tends to be an easier material to budget into your renovation costs, and is a strong, long-lasting type of flooring. However, there are a few different types of tile to choose from. Let’s take a look at the different types and how you can choose the best one for your kitchen.
Types of Kitchen Tile
Porcelain
Made from a combination of clay and sand that is fired at a very high temperature and pressurized, porcelain is a dense and hard tile. This gives it strength that makes it a great tile for highly trafficked areas such as the kitchen.
Porcelain comes either glazed or unglazed, which you’ll need to decide between. Glazed porcelain comes with a coating added during firing that gives the tile a colored surface and makes it easy to spot any scratches the tile receives. The color of unglazed porcelain is added to the clay mixture before firing so that the color permeates the tile. Without the glassy surface of a glazed tile, unglazed porcelain hides any scratches the tile receives.
Stone
Stone tiles are made from natural stones such as marble, limestone, granite, slate, and more. They are very porous and less durable than other types of tile, which causes them to need replenishing every few years with stone sealer.
These tiles tend to require more maintenance than other types, but can easily be polished or honed for a like-new aesthetic.
Ceramic
Which tile flooring is right will you choose?
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