Re: Kitchen flooring material: ?anyone used ceramic tile?
From: Dick Margulis (dickdmargulis.com)
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 11:45:06 -0700 (PDT)
On 3/11/2018 2:22 PM, Ruth J Hirsch wrote:
Hi,

We are looking at kitchen flooring material.
Complicated decision.
Someone has suggested ceramic.  Has anyone actually had experience with this?
Concerns include:  breakage of items dropped and how does the grout wear?
Appreciate your input

Does the question concern home kitchen or common house kitchen? The concerns are similar but not identical.

The first issue is what's the subfloor constructed of? If this is a suspended wooden floor (over a basement or crawl space, in other words), then there is some give to the floor, and in a home kitchen the wear and tear on knees might not be a major issue. If the tile is to be laid on a concrete slab, though, and if this is to be in the common house, where meal prep can take a few hours, I can tell you from personal experience that some people will experience significant knee pain over time. Maybe other joints and spine, too. (I worked for several years in a commercial bakery that had a ceramic tile floor over a concrete slab. Yeah, there's a difference between two hours of meal prep and fifty hours a week of heavy lifting, so it's a matter of degree, I guess.)

Breakage is definitely a problem. This applies not just to glassware and china but also to knives (and you do not want steel shards flying around any more than you want glass shards flying around).

Grout can be problematic. If the floor is not sloped to a floor drain, standing water (from spills or from mopping) can erode and lift grout if there are any imperfections. Grout can be dug out and repaired when that happens, but if the kitchen is in daily use, there may not be enough time for the patch to fully cure, and the cycle will continue.

Dick Margulis
Rocky Corner cohousing
Bethany CT





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