General, Social Commentary

New Kitchen Flooring

11 Comments

Well, the hardest part is done — we finally selected and purchased some. Installing will be a snap (literally, in this case, since it’s click-lock laminate) by comparison.

Similarly, I always find the hardest part of painting to be color selection. At least as long as it’s a group effort.

11 thoughts on “New Kitchen Flooring”

  1. Honest opinion, take it back to the store. Really disappointed with our pergo. Horrible in kitchens.

    1. Actually, it’s not Pergo. Everyone makes the stuff now. It might be manufactured by Pergo (or by whoever manufactures Pergo), but it’s branded by Hampton Bay. I put in a similar product from Armstrong in our Colorado rental three years ago, and we’ve been happy with it. It’s only a hundred fifty bucks, it will go in quickly, and if we don’t like it, we’ll redo it later, but we really want to cover up the old vinyl.

  2. I always leave color decisions to my better half – of course, I just found out tonight that my favorite shirt is not green, but grey… oops, I thought I had Saint Patty covered!

  3. ” Installing will be a snap (literally, in this case, since it’s click-lock laminate) by comparison.”

    Think so?

    Kinda depends upon the consistency of your sub-floor. If it does turn out that installation is a snap I’ll be very happy for you.

  4. I’d rather lay flooring on I-40 from the the Atlantic Ocean, to Barstow, than paint. I hate painting.

  5. I pretty particular about selecting a wood that’s some sort of wood color.

    Anyway, yesterday I had the idea of using a scanner to scan pieces of wood and read the grain (no problem with modern tech), then print the wood’s own grain pattern back on the wood with a color printer loaded with different kinds of wood stain. That should allow you to either accentuate the grain or subdue it, add highlights where none existed, or create subtle effects that nobody even tries, as if a master woodsmith spent 20 years sorting through lumber until he figured out how to make it seem to transition naturally from maple to oak to ash, or to put subliminal or more obvious advertising on basketball courts.

    Perhaps you could combine a scanner, and printer, and a Roomba and turn it loose on your floor, or run the boards under a device you cobble together.

    A year or two ago I had a similar idea of using an iPhone leaf identifier ap and a robot mower to roam your yard and spray particular herbicides only on the leaves of the weeds you want to get rid of.

    BTW, does anyone here have experience with aluminum forging? I’ve been looking at different ways to forge isogrid sheets and one of the simpler methods (from a tooling standpoint) involves moving steel triangles down about halfway through the workpiece (a plate) and then shifting them sideways in a coordinated motion to form the rib and flange around each node. I’m not sure the aluminum can flow in the manner the technique would require.

    In another side note, if I run a LH2/LOX thruster with a flow rate of 1 kg/sec into a pipe and then inject 40 kg/sec of LH or LOX into the pipe radially (drill some holes in the exhaust pipe and weld on a tapering feed pipe), the final velocity of the exhaust and propellant will eventually be 100 m/sec (conservation of momentum). The exhaust will freeze into ice, raising the LOX temperature by about 30 K, and I think I can recover the pressure head from the stream of droplets (which takes some cleverness but little in the way of mechanics) but would I really need to do that or could I just inject the high-velocity low-pressure fuel stream directly against the combustion chamber pressure and let the pressure differential decelerate the stream? The latter is such an odd thought that I don’t have a mental model that includes it, but if I can avoid going from velocity to pressure just to convert pressure back to velocity, it would be simpler to skip that step.

    Parts of the idea are so far in left-field that I don’t even think they could be adequately modeled (injection of cryogenic liquids into a supersonic exhaust flow, freezing of the exhaust into ice-crystals mixed with LOX or LH2, possibly necking the tube down just past where the flow should go subsonic (not required), plus some potentially nasty starup transients where the LOX might all vaporize, etc), but if it worked it would make for a really cheap high-pressure pump with pretty good performance and no moving parts.

    Anyway, I thought I’d toss out the wood grain printer idea to make you feel inadequately techy as you snap down the mass produced flooring. ^_^

  6. For what it’s worth, if you weren’t already going to do so, I would highly recommend taking the time to glue the edges of the boards in the areas most likely to be exposed to spills such as the sink area and in front of the dishwasher. This provides a moisture barrier and helps to prevent warping. The manufacturer should have a recommended product. I did this in a kitchen that ended up being a rental unit here in Colorado and after 7 years and 4 tenants the floor still looks great.

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