Kitchen remodels

[Crankin]

I have no issue with the beautiful tile in my kitchen. Yea, we have occasionally dropped something and it broke (like a glass), but it probably would have done the same in my last kitchen, which had hard wood floors. I liked those, too. At first, we questioned the wisdom of hardwood in the kitchen, but it worked. I have hardwood in my kitchen eating area and dining room now, but tile in the cooking area/entry way. My feet don't hurt, either, and I do cook. We did look into cork, but at that time we just couldn't spend the $.
And +1 on getting the best dishwasher you can. The one we got for the remodel, well after 3 years the top rack disintegrated, fell, and broke about half of our glassware that was in there! The same thing started happening again, so we got a Bosch a few months ago and I like it a lot.
I love stainless. Yes, splatters show, but just a quick wipe with the stainless cleaner after each meal does it. Same with the granite cleaner.

[goldfinch]

I've had kitchens with tile floors, wood floors, marmoleum and old fashioned linoleum. My favorite was the wood. It was an old floor but refinished with some extra layers of finish. It was very durable and looked nice for all the years we lived in that house.

The tile was ok but I did not like the grout line maintenance.

The marmoleum is in our condo. It went down in planks over a cork base. I have some issues with it. One is that the dog has trouble walking on it. She slips. It doesn't feel slippery but for some reason the dog has trouble. It also shows dirt. I got a light, bright yellow and it is very pretty but boy you have to keep it clean. Finally and worst of all I dropped a knife in the kitchen and it made a little chip in the floor. The chip always looks dirty. Most might not notice it but it makes me question the durability. It has only been in a couple of years so I don't know what it is going to look like long term.

The old linoleum is in our summer home. At some point we are going to replace it, probably with wood.

A friend has cork floors in their kitchen. The cork had a light color dye on it rather than natural. The dye is wearing off and it doesn't look very nice anymore. If you get cork I would get it without a dye.

One thing we did in our old house was really work on the lighting in the kitchen. We added two skylights. What a tremendous difference it made in the natural lighting of the room. That was the best decision we made. We also put in a gas fireplace on a timer. In freezing winter mornings I could wake up to a nice, toasty warm kitchen. As an aside, we also put heated tile flooring in the bathroom, which was incredibly nice as well.