Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Kitchen flooring material: ?anyone used ceramic tile?

[Catya Belfer (catya]

As someone who spends a lot of time cooking in our common house kitchen,
I'd say: NOT STONE.  Ow, my feet :)

Ours is, I believe, epoxy over wood, it's held up well for 9 years so far.
We have the grittyness in it to keep it from being super slippery, which
makes cleaning it something of a chore, but nothing unmanageable.

     - cat

Catya Belfer   -  www.catya.org
Technical Director   -   www.cohousing.org
Cohousing in MA - www.mosaic-commons.org

On Sun, Mar 11, 2018 at 3:15 PM, Ruth J Hirsch <heidinys [at] earthlink.net>
wrote:

> Thank you very much, Dick.  Already helpful!
> This is for the CommonHouse kitchen
> Over wooden sub floor.
>
> ruth
>
>
> On Mar 11, 2018, at 2:44 PM, Dick Margulis <dick [at] dmargulis.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
> PS:  I have an intermittent e-mail glitch.  If you write and do not hear
> back from me shortly, please call me or please re-send.  Thank you,  Ruth
>
>
>
>
>
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