I’m thinking of bamboo flooring. does anyone have bamboo flooring in their home and what they think of it? ie. Pros/cons/durability/etc.
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None in our home.
But I've installed it for several customers.
We stapled it down-takes LESS air than hardwoods or engineered floors. In test pcs, start around 75 lbs-sacrifice a few pcs till you get the pressure right. Too high and it'll split the tongues.
Not as hard as you think it will be. Rolling refrigerators without a pc of 1/8 " masonite or other protectioin will "crush" the surface.
Wild Look, not for every decor.
Unpack several boxes and mix and match, especially on the light colors. I had one job where we mixed maybe 6 boxes or more to start=no dicernable differerenc, got down to the 10th box and there were several pkgs that had a definite change in hue-the whole box, not just a few pcs. It was like this for quite a few of the remaining boxes. Luckily the layout of the kitchen masked the changes.
Did not notice this much box color change on a different brand and the darker bamboo.
Do your research
We had it for over 7 years in our old house. It was a great floor for the below-grade application, it was very stable and stayed nice and tight all seasons. Not as hard as it was made out to be - the floor dented when my daughter built structures with maple blocks and then knocked them down again. One thing to be careful of is to research the brand you buy. We had to look hard for an outfit that did not use formaldehyde glues. Because bamboo is essentially an engineered wood, it is very dependent on glues. I am sensitive to OSB and this was going into my daughter's bedroom so it was important to us that it not offgas a lot. At the time there was only one company (at least that I could order from online) that could meet air quality standards. Likewise, while bamboo itself is very "green", the process of turning it into flooring really isn't because of its dependency on chemicals and the fact that it is getting shipped across an ocean to get here. So unless you are using it instead of some other engineered exotic wood (as opposed to locally milled solid), you aren't doing the planet any big favors.
I loved the look of it, was happy with the renewability of the bamboo, it was pretty durable overall and I would do it again.