Repairing Buckled Hardwood Flooring in the Kitchen
I laughed today when I read: "When it comes to the best laid plans of mice and men, it’s wise to bet on the mice."
By the same token, when it comes to a battle between hardwood flooring and water, put your money on the water to win, in the long run.
For example, those lovely water and ice dispensers in our refrigerators are so handy and useful. We have one in OUR kitchen, which is floored with a dark-stained 2-1/2” red oak hardwood.
But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that fragile piping spring a leak and slowly but surely damage the flooring around the fridge.
In Colleyville, Texas recently, we were called in to repair just such a situation. A beautiful solid oak floor had buckled and been ruined. We needed to take out about fifteen square feet of flooring, including the plywood subfloor, and replace with new, raw wood. 
We suggested to the customer, as we always do, that it was best to refinish the flooring every place that wood connects with wood. This would have taken the refinish job into several adjoining rooms. The customer opted to only sand, stain and polyurethane the kitchen floor, in order to save a little money.
In the end, she loved the way the new kitchen floor looked, but then said she wished she had taken our advice and refinished all the hardwood flooring because the new area looks so much better than the other rooms!