I have light porcelain tile. I love wood floors - had them in my kitchen in the past - decided I wanted something more impervious to kitchen wear and tear. I have cat dishes in my kitchen and in the past I was constantly preoccupied with the water getting on the wood floor and it did damage it over time. Plus I wanted something other than brown for a change.

I got light floors because my cabinets are very dark. They do show everything but the tile is very smooth so easy to wipe up as needed. I would not change this because I wouldn't want everything dark in my kitchen. But if that was not an issue I would pick a medium color with similar grout and then every little thing wouldn't show.

I've had tile now for three year and I really like it. I haven't resealed my grout and it's fine. It doesn't stain though it has darkened over time - which doesn't bother me. This would probably bother someone alot if they had light grout and wanted it to stay light, bright and pristine - I would avoid that if getting tile.

I love marmoleum but decided it just didn't seem quite right in my house and/or with the other things I chose for my kitchen.

I have tile-look laminate planks, and it was a great choice for me. It was fairly easy to install, easy to care for, nice on my feet, and looks great. I was prepared for it to look "tile like" and not necessarily fool people, but most people have thought it was tile even standing on it. (Granted, they are not TKO or T Remodel O). It is a dark floor.

I was going to use hard wood as I thought it would be a bit easier on my joints when I stand in the kitchen over a period of time. Tile is hard. I didn't want to deal with grout.

I also looked at Marmolium but didn't find a pattern that I loved for my kitchen. I also looked at cork but again, the one I liked was not available here and didn't want to try to refinish it or reseal it every few years. I also looked at bamboo but checked my neighbors house who had it. The one I liked scratched and it does dent. It is not quite as hard as they advertise it is. So, no bamboo.

I had wood laminate in the kitchen in the past and loved the easy care of it. I went with it again, when Lowe's tripled the price of the wood I wanted. The laminate is so easy to take care of. It does look great. I had the laminate that looked like tile in there before. I am now going with one that looks like wood to match the adjoining living/dining room area. While I am mourning the loss of my beautiful wood, I think it will be OK in the long run. Excuse the gorilla glue on my granite sample. Boyfriend decided to break it into three different pieces.

We have slate in our entire great room, which includes the kitchen area. The original hardwood floors were in bad shape and needed more than just refinishing. We thought about replacing them with wood, but decided to go with slate because we were installing hydronic radiant heat anyway, and the slate would hold the heat better than wood.

The pros of slate:
never shows dirt
durable
looks good in our log home
will never need to be refinished, like wood

The cons of slate:
hard to stand on for long periods of time (for some people)
not a good surface for a baby to crawl on
pieces flake off from time to time, especially for the first few months
mops shred after a few uses
chairs wobble sometimes
heavier than tile, so you need very sturdy support joists

{{!gwi}}

We have hardwoods everywhere else, but our kitchen will not be open, so we don't have to match. We have lots of pets who spend all their time in the kitchen, plus two entries from outside directly into the kitchen, so we've decided no wood floor there. We have tile in our current kitchen, and I don't seem to have a problem standing on it, and I'm almost 60. So we'll go with tile again. What I do hate are grout lines, so we will be using a large format, rectified tile with 1/16" grout lines. This will add a lot to the cost of installation, but I don't care! We have not decided on a color, but with walnut lowers, we will probably go for a lighter floor for contrast.

A dear friend with a gorgeous restored all maple kitchen (including all her countertops) went with a commercial resilient floor in her kitchen. It seems to be bombproof and it comes in a variety of finishes and colors. She used the Rouleau pattern in a robin's egg blue from the link below. It really looks beautiful, but wouldn't work with my design.

Here is a link that might be useful: burke flooring

I went with natural linoleum (Armstrong's, not Forbo's) in a cream color with traditional marbling. Wanted a resilient floor that toned in with our adjoining old-growth oak...ended up with sheet lino but love the patterns you can get with the tiles -- and of course the borders/designs you can have inlaid when using sheet.

Guess that's not much help to you as it sounds as if you've ruled out lino? Afraid I can't relate to not finding a pattern you like as I loved so many patterns and colors! [Used one of the more sedate marblings.]

Four-plus years later, have zero regrets about looks or function/maintenance and in fact are putting the same in our in-progress bathroom reno.

I'm one of those wood floor people. However, if our subfloor could have handled it, we probably would have gone with slate or travertine. I prefer to use natural materials as much as possible.

We have brick floors throughout our entire house. Why? Because our home has all adobe walls inside and out and the brick floors look great with this type of Spanish hacienda home. The pros & cons are actually the same as Uxorial (gorgeous floors, BTW!) has listed. They really are tough floors that don't show a lot of dirt, but they do make my feet tired if I stand on them too long. They're very tough on dropped dishes and glasses and they shred most mops. We have to buy ours at a restaurant supply place, but they're good ones and last a long time. We tried out many different vacuums on them before settling on a Miele White Star, which is wonderful on brick floors . . . and it's rugs. Brick floors are not rough, though, and with our in-floor radiant heat, they're wonderful to walk on year round. Like every other New Mexico home I've ever been in, we use Oriental, Navajo, cowhide, sheepskin or rag rugs on our brick floors throughout. The most common, which may surprise many non-New Mexican's, are Oriental rugs.

Thanks so much, everyone.

I haven't ruled out lino house_vixen, but just got a bit discouraged. Have only looked at Forbo, I will check out what Armstrong has to offer. Considered rubber (sortof jokingly) but I will check out this Burke stuff too.

Thanks!

We have slate floors and love them. Uxorial did a great job of listing the pros and cons. About 2/3 of the floors in our house are slate (as they were in our last house), with cork in the bedrooms and cherry in the library and dressing room (which will also be our art gallery once we have doors covering our clothing hangers and stacked drawers). The slate was laid in different patterns (which my husband designed) in different rooms, which helps set each room apart.

I like hardwood, I really like the look of slate and random size tile. The wife did not want tile, too hard, too cold. We look at cork but didn't want to chance it and did not like the look. We had laminate before and the Dish washer leaked, ruined the floor and It didn't wear great. We didn't want vinyl self stick tile or sheet goods. What we choose was Allure vinyl plank floating floor by traffic master. It is a thick vinyl in approx 5" x 3ft planks one has a sticky strip on the top side and one on the bottom. They stick together sot the floor floats but is pretty heavy. Its pretty cheap and looks really great. I installed it after the cabinets were in so Im thinking that if we don't like it it will be easy to remove and replace having only spent $200. Here is a picture.
There is a large thread in the forums someplace.

{{!gwi}}

We have http://www.kronoflooring.com/en/castello.shtml laminate and it is great.

It is made in the EU and meets all of their safety and enviromental standards, is made from mainly recycled wood and looks and feels better than our oak floors (to me).

These are just a few of the ceramic floors I've done, with the exception of the 3rd floor down. That one's san cecilia granite.

We love our Marmoleum Click. True, there were not a lot of color options, but we went with the medium gray 1' x 3' planks, and randomly threw in cream colored 1' x 1' tiles to break it up.

We have ceramic tile floors, light but with a mix of grays and a touch of orange. It brightens up our kitchen and has the added benefit that it doesn't show the Maryland red dirt! We have 2 dogs that would have done a number very quickly on hardwood as well.

During my recent baking marathon I noticed no difference in comfort/lack thereof than we had with vinyl...I'm very relieved about that! I had read so many people here talking about how hard it is on their backs/legs/feet but so far so good...no problems (and I'm in my 50s!)

Before cabinets & before grout:

With grout:

I'd post a more recent picture w/cabinets but my dear dear DH dropped my digital camera on the concrete at a recent baseball game and it no longer stays on unless I hold it at an odd angle...difficult to take pictures & I haven't been able to download what few I have taken! [I'm now researching digital cameras...I think it's the first non-kitchen item I've researched in almost a year!]

OOh, I hadn't considered cats and cork as a potential problem. But I can see that they might find it attractive, just as they do furniture with nubbly or loosely woven upholstery.

Has anyone had any problem w/ cork and cats?

We have porcelain tile that I fell in love with a year before we even considered remodeling. It looks a lot like the tile in Bill's fourth picture. It does not show dirt at all. The only disadvantage was that it was a pain to install, but if you're not DIY that's irrelevant (it was the easiest of our tile jobs, but there's not enough money in the world for me to tile full time!).

We have dark walnut cabinets and bookcases and shutters and pantry doors in our kitchen/family room. Soapstone counters. We needed a light floor that wasn't hard on the feet. We selected a Mannington stone look laminate floor with 15" squares, and put it on top of a 1/4" thick rubber pad. Super duper! Nothing sticks to it, it cleans up easily with a damp cloth, dirt doesn't show, it is quiet to walk on, it doesn't scratch, and has a low sheen, textured finish. I have real 12" ceramic tiles butting up to it, and real wood (red oak) elsewhere. They all go together.

Travertine.

I vote for cork or lino, having endured a loathed porcelain tile floor that was killer on my feet and legs during longer cooking sessions.

For what it's worth, I have a friend with 2 cats and cork flooring in most of her rooms and so far, so good. It's not as rubbery/loose as you might think, and I don't think it's occurred to the the felines that it's scratchable ... at least not yet.

We have travertine, and it has worked out pretty well so far. I've posted plenty about my flooring dilemmas and how this was a hasty, unresearched choice, but most of my fears about it have been proven unfounded. It is hard, but I have area rugs in the places where I stand a lot and those are thick enough that I haven't suffered any ill effects from the hardness. The one thing that has been dropped on it shattered impressively, though. It's cold, but in Florida, I consider that a plus. I was worried about staining and etching, but the variation in the stone makes it so nothing shows anyway--oh and it matches my dogs perfectly! It wasn't my first choice by a long shot, but it has turned out to be a pretty good one.

I had no idea about all these options! Flooring is the one thing I thought was a given so guess I didn't do any research. Thanks for all the pics and ideas. You all truly are a gold mine.

As for the cats and cork - I have checked out samples and was surprised at how "dense" it was. True, the cats might be fine with it. But one of them actually had an old cork bulletin board as her scratching post for several of her early years. Not sure if I want to risk it.

The rooms on either side of my kitchen have wood floors. One is natural(unstained) oak, and the other is medium brown stained maple. I couldn't decide on a wood (and finish) that would bridge the two, so I went with slate. The slate is tumbled, so I didn't have to worry about the slate flaking off. The colors of each individual tile are very varied, so much so that I spent the day with the installers helping pick out the tiles-they didn't want the responsibility of picking them out themselves.

The only downside to the floor is that it can be difficult to stand on for long periods of time, but in the two years since it was installed, this has really not been a problem.

Rich

Here is a link that might be useful: kitchen pics

We're doing the Forbo Walnut color in sheet linoleum. It's inexpensive and we preferred to spend our budget elsewhere- figure it is vintage to our home and can be easily upgraded later. With area rugs, or a linoleum insert- it will look kind of like wood with a rug look. I don't have a picture of ours yet or else I would show you! :) The walnut color is really rich- you should check it out! I was rather discouraged by the Armstrong colors though... Bleck!

I have cork and it my favorite thing about my new kitchen.

Cork flooring is available in two different forms, The first are tiles or sheets of "raw" cork that are installed and then the floor is finished with a protective coating. The second are planks of pre-made cork floor, where all of the layers of the finished floor are already layered and cut into planks like float flooring. I have this second kind.

The protective top layer on the plank flooring is very smooth. It is more like a sheet of plastic applied to the plank, as opposed to a rolled or painted on finish that is applied to raw cork. This plastic finish, while soft and resilient, is very smooth - you can not feel the texture of the cork at all.

I am not too familiar with the habits of cats, but I am assuming you expect the texture of cork to be fun for the cats to scratch? If they wouldn't scratch Marmoleum or VCT, they won't scratch this.

If you have your heart set on cork don't give up quite yet. Check out Wicander's Cork.

Nicole

Here is a link that might be useful: Wicander's cork flooring

I have a Shaw laminate floor with a stone look. Extremely practical , doesn't show dirt, and is easy to stand on. It is light colored whitish gray and I have white cabinets. Very happy with it .

We have cork, and a cat. It's too dense for her to want to claw on. About the only thing she has done with the cork is lay her fat belly on it to cool off when it's hot out. :)

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OOh, I hadn't considered cats and cork as a potential problem. But I can see that they might find it attractive, just as they do furniture with nubbly or loosely woven upholstery.
Has anyone had any problem w/ cork and cats?