With everything out of the kitchen and the walls painted, our next step was to put in the flooring.
We opted for PVC due to the ease of both laying and cleaning it, as well as the cost-effectiveness. We plan on staying in this flat maybe five years longer, so it’s not going to be our dream kitchen, but we still want it to be nice.
The hardest part was actually deciding what flooring we wanted, since so many of the PVC options–whether at Bauhaus, Hellweg, or other flooring stores–were either ugly, or the wrong size. Our kitchen is 2.5 meters by 4.95 meters, so in order to avoid having multiple pieces of flooring, we needed 3-meter long pieces. Unfortunately, these are limited, and buying 4 meters of flooring was paying a lot for things we weren’t using.
Luckily, on the day we decided to buy flooring regardless, we found a pattern we’d seen before that we liked, and it was available in 2, 3, and 4 meters. So it was an easy choice. It still remains to be seen how well it will work with the furniture (although it looks great with the paint) but we both figure it is one of the least important things about the kitchen.
For the flooring, we called upon our other familial resources, with F. (the husband of M.’s mother) coming to help us out. So after removing the panels beneath the baseboards (I have no idea the proper name for this in German or English), scraping the floor so that it’s smooth and sweeping and mopping for cleanliness, the guys put in the flooring together.
Already, things are much cozier.