You may love the appearance of wood but prefer to use other materials in your kitchen design because timber can be susceptible to water damage. Many other options can replicate the beauty of timber and not have its problems. Here are several alternatives to consider during your renovation.
Laminate
One possibility is laminate. You could install faux timber laminate cabinetry or floor planks. Laminate does a great job of emulating wood as it uses sophisticated photography techniques. Laminate consists of an inner board such as MDF. This is covered with a decorative paper layer that can be imprinted with a timber photo. The surface is then finished with a plastic film for protection from water and damage.
Laminate looks beautiful and realistic because it uses actual wood images. This technology allows the look of expensive, exclusive, and otherwise unattainable timber species to be available at a reasonable price. You can get laminate cabinet doors and flooring in faux oak, jarrah, blackbutt, and many other tree varieties. Each of these brings different wood tones to the kitchen design. You can opt for a pale fawn, reddish, or deep cocoa colour, whatever suits your home.
Luxury Vinyl Planks
Another way to incorporate the appeal of timber into custom kitchens is with vinyl floor planks. These planks typically consist of several layers, including a decorative layer that provides the wood appearance and a durable wear coating. Vinyl planks come in various thicknesses. If your subfloor is not perfectly flat and smooth, it may benefit from thicker planks that won't highlight the defects.
Vinyl planks are sold in shapes and sizes that replicate the proportions of genuine hardwood boards. This similarity and the joins and patterns of the planks help to make the flooring look authentic. However, as vinyl is water resistant, you won't have to panic if you spill a liquid in the kitchen. One thing you do have to be careful of, however, is not to drag heavy furniture over the vinyl to avoid scratching or damaging the surface.
Engineered Wood
Engineered wood is another material you could consider for your kitchen renovation. Rather than using photographic technology, these products use actual wood. They're covered with a wood veneer, a thin slice of timber that is bonded to the top. So if you install engineered timber floor planks or cupboard doors, what you see is genuine wood. However, the inside of the board is made of materials other than solid wood. For example, it could be plywood, which is itself made of multiple thin wood strips glued together.
Engineered timber helps to combat one of the major weaknesses of solid wood: its tendency to expand and contract as the kitchen becomes humid and then cold at different times. Plywood provides a stable inner core because each wood layer is set with grains at a right angle to the previous layer. Because the grains of the entire piece of plywood form a criss-cross pattern, it's relatively stable. So if you want timber flooring in your kitchen, engineered planks bring the veneer of timber with added resilience.
For more information, contact a custom kitchen designer near you.
Remodelling your home can be a big task. You've most likely stopped by this blog because you are looking for information which will help you to remodel your property. You've certainly come to the right place as this blog contains articles which cover almost every aspect of the remodelling process. I will be exploring remodelling ideas for the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and communal areas of your home. I will also look at inventive ways in which you can transform areas of your home and make use of dead space. Although I'm not a professional remodelling contractor, I have recently finished doing a lot of research by speaking to people who work in the trade and reading magazines.