Granite Floors Are Hard to Beat! By Michael Russell There are lots of different materials in modern use for flooring, so why granite? Well, for starters, granite is probably one of the hardest, most durable and long lasting mediums available for floors. In the home, different rooms may benefit from different types of stone floor, but for kitchens, granite stands out head and shoulders above the rest. It is, of course a personal choice dictated by use, amount of human traffic and overall aesthetics. Here we will discuss the pros and cons of granite flooring as a great looking, extremely durable, easy to maintain and easy to clean material for your interior floor and how granite flooring really is hard to beat! Granite floors and kitchens go together like hand and glove. The kitchen is the one room in the house where the floor gets maximum use and suffers the most in the way of spills of all kinds, dropped items likely to cause damage and constant cleaning. So granite, being the most capable flooring material to endure everything a kitchen can throw at it, really is a great choice for that room in the house. Granite comes in many different styles and patterns so it will always look good and aesthetically pleasing. Granite, being one of the hardest, most durable materials for flooring there is, makes it a supreme choice for a kitchen floor. It is resilient to staining as well as acid and alkali chemical spills. It will resist grease, fat and oil spills as well as boiling water, tea and coffee, fizzy, sugary drinks; in fact just about anything a hyperactive chef can throw at it! It will survive being bombarded by falling cutlery, crockery and glassware as long as the resulting rubble is swiftly swept up and not left to be ground in by a myriad of shod feet. This leads us on to keeping your granite floor clean. Cleaning granite is a relatively simple procedure. Sweeping and mopping with warm water daily, as well as following any accidental crockery breakages will keep it clean and shiny. A once weekly clean with stone soap, followed by a rinsing mop with plain water helps to keep the floor sealed and shiny. Having said this, there is one disadvantage of granite flooring that needs to be highlighted. Despite its hardness, granite can be scratched by quartz. Quartz is a sand-like material that can be brought into a home on the soles of shoes. The heavy human traffic that a kitchen gets could cause those small, sandy particles that are deposited over the surface of the granite to cause minute scratches. This will create a dulling effect on the surface, which, if left to worsen over time, will require specialist treatment to recover its original luster. Restoring a badly scratched and dulled granite floor is expensive and there is a good chance that the process with alter the granite colors. For this reason, it is best to practice "prevention is better than cure" and get into the habit of sweeping and mopping daily to minimize this potential problem. Despite its one easily avoidable disadvantage, a granite floor makes an extremely good looking, durable, hard wearing and easily cleaned and maintained surface custom made for most designs of kitchen. So for kitchen floors, granite really is hard to beat. See Granite Countertops