Kitchen Flooring in Glasgow

When the kitchen floor is also the living room floor

68.7% of Glasgow households live in a flat, 1st of 151 towns and against 34.4% for Scotland, and 66.7% live in a purpose-built block or tenement. The flats guide notes that in most modern flats the kitchen runs straight into the living room, so the kitchen floor is usually the living room floor as well.

That changes the brief. A floor chosen only for the sink end has to look right under a sofa, and a floor chosen only for the sofa has to survive the sink. Where your kitchen is open to the living room, choose one floor that does both jobs rather than two that meet at a threshold. In an older tenement flat with a separate kitchen, the question does not arise.

Kitchens in rented flats: keep laminate out

35.0% of Glasgow households rent from the council or a housing association (Scotland: 22.5%) and 16.9% rent privately (Scotland: 12.9%). The rentals guide is consistent across both: laminate is a sensible saving in bedrooms and on landings, but in a kitchen it is a replacement waiting for a date.

The reason is the leak you cannot see coming. A dishwasher hose or a slow drip under the sink in a let goes unnoticed until the joints have lifted, and the repair then undoes the saving. In a rented kitchen, specify a floor that takes on no water from the first tenancy.

Tenements, 1951 townships and what the kitchen sits on

An estimated 43% of dwellings in the Glasgow City council area were built before 1945 (Scotland: 28%). After the war came the townships: Castlemilk, Pollok, Drumchapel and Easterhouse were created under the 1951 Development Plan, as Historic Scotland and the council record. Kitchens are where LVT earns its place, and the subfloor under a kitchen differs with the age of the building, so a pre-war tenement kitchen and a post-war township kitchen need different preparation.

1.7% of households live in a flat in part of a converted or shared house (Scotland: 1.6%). There the kitchen may sit on timber joists rather than a concrete slab, and the same covering behaves differently on each; in any flat, find out which you have before you order.

Large homes are rare: 8.1% of households have four or more bedrooms, against 17.2% in Scotland. Where you are flooring a whole house on a fixed budget, the bedrooms guide suggests taking money out of the bedrooms and putting it into the hall, the kitchen and the stairs.