Hi All, please forgive this long saga - we just started our kitchen renovation and ran into a problem. We have a long, tile-floored kitchen with the cooking area connected by a doorway into the living room, and with the seating area at the other end of the kitchen. Today contractor did the demo and found that there were 2 subfloors under the tile on the main 'cooking' part of the kitchen, but only one subfloor under the seating area. Then they realized that the height of the joists under the seating area (which I think used to be a breezeway) were higher than the joist height under the cooking area (so that's probably why they needed 2 subfloors under the cooking area, to make the floor height level-ish across the whole kitchen).

The issue is that we wanted the wood floor in the living room to continue into the kitchen to create an open feel, and we wanted the level of the floor to be the same between living room and kitchen. We can achieve that now that the double subfloors have been removed and we can just add the subfloor and the wood floor on top of that. However, if we do that then there will be a difference in height (maybe 3/4 inch or so) between the floor in the cooking area and the floor in the seating area because of the higher joists under the seating area. We think that redoing the joists in the seating area would be a very large project that we don't even think would work. We are meeting with the contractor tomorrow to see what he thinks would be the best way to handle this.

What I don't want is a non-obvious change in floor level anywhere because I think that would encourage tripping. Especially because we are trying to make the house layout safer for us as we get older, I don't want to introduce a potential hazard. Maybe the best thing to do is abandon the continuation of the floor idea between kitchen and living room, make the level of the entire kitchen floor the same as it is now by having a double subfloor under the cooking area or whatever is needed to make entire kitchen floor level. I think that would mean we might need a different type of flooring in the kitchen than in the living room to make it obvious that there is a potential height change there, and have a threshold between the kitchen and Living room to "announce" that there is a level change between kitchen and living room. I'm not sure if this means we should also have a different kind of flooring (like tile or something) in the kitchen. This kind of stinks because I was hoping for the expansive and open feeling that I think the wood floor continuation would bring, but I figure it can still be nice and I would rather have things safer in the house. I did consider maybe continuing the wood from the living room into the cooking area of the kitchen, and then having tile at a higher level in the seating area, but again we would have to have a long, maybe 10 ft threshold between the 2 areas and have the tile area 3/4" or so higher than the wooden cooking area floor. Do you have any inclinations about what the best approach would be here, more ideas, or maybe have you ever run into such craziness before? Thanks for any insights!! :)