If considering wood you could get unfinished wood installed. Companies such as Wood Floor Accessories are a great supplier. Having it finished on site means a finish can be picked that works for your home. Each home has variables such as pets, different traffic and the owners desire to maintain the flooring or aversion to maintenance. Having wood finished on site has advantages. You can pick the highest quality product that works for your budget. The range of finishes available is quite wide. A professional company will try to understand your home and recommend the appropriate finish. They will also understand how easily the finish was can be renovated in the future. Amtico is an extremely robust product but being plastic, is just plastic flooring. It has its place, as does wood. In areas that have plenty of light surfaces, scratches show very easily on Amtico, Karndean etc. The manufacturers push a polishing maintenance product on consumers. However, this needs to be stripped and reapplied on a regular basis.

Ask your self if the kitchen is actually a good kitchen….. if you need a utility room next to the kitchen for additional refrigeration or storage or additional work surface then it’s not a good enough kitchen for you. Ideally the utility should be just a laundry room in which case it’s best near the bedrooms upstairs or at least near the bottom of the stairs.

We are coming to the end of a house renovation and we had wet UFH installed in all our rooms. It is a bungalow however, it is very unusual property with rooms below the bungalow so it is like a house in some respects. We have a mixture of solid floors and suspended timber floors and couldnt have a screeded system because of the weight. We had an ESP overlay board system installed and have found it to be very effective. Ours is run off an ASHP so I cannot tell you how it would work off gas central heating. Our UFH is on 24/7 controlled by thermostats in each room/area. We did install internal wall insulation on all of the external walls and window reveals and voids beneath the floorboards where possible and my understanding is that this is key to efficient and cost effective UFH.

We had our bedroom floor done 3 years, it’s about 27sqm. It only cost c1k but we didn’t need sound insulation. The guy was an antique furniture restorer who started refurbishing floors as a sideline and i suspect he seriously undercharged us..We also didn’t need much in terms of repair work, all boards were sound and only 1 had been replaced at some point in its lifetime, you may also find holes where central heating has been installed or gaps under skirting etc i think you need to consider whether you’d be happy with all the dents as pine is such a soft wood. We hung new curtains days after the floor being done and the ladder (sat on a towel) created dents. We put furniture pads under everything but have had no need to move the furniture since but i suspect it has big dents everywhere! It's fine for us jn a bedroom but not sure if i could cope in a living space