Engineered wood flooring can be installed in a kitchen as long as it is subsequently cleaned and maintained correctly. There is unfortunately no such thing as a self-cleaning, impenetrable wood floor, but wood flooring finished with either an oiled or lacquered finish is perfectly suitable for a kitchen provided you look after it.Oiled and lacquered finishes are both hardwearing, but protect your wood in different ways. Oil penetrates and saturates the wood, protecting it from within, whereas lacquer sits upon the surface as a protective film. Spills can be wiped from an oiled floor without leaving a mark but if you leave them for a prolonged period of time they will leave a stain. If you apply a coat of maintenance oil once or twice a year as recommended you should not have any issues with stains or marks, but if you allow your floor to dry out the wood will become porous and absorb more moisture, which will cause the floor to mark and stain. A great advantage to oiled floors is that they are easily reparable by lightly sanding out marks and stains and then applying a coat of maintenance oil to reseal the floor.A lacquer is a coating which sits on the surface of your wood floor almost like a plastic film protecting it. It take longer for a spill to penetrate a lacquered finish than an oiled one, but although lacquer is very tough it is not impenetrable. If something spills on the floor and is left there it will eventually penetrate the lacquer and stain the wood beneath, which is difficult to fix as lacquer cannot be spot fixed very effectively