My weekend project(bamboo flooring)

[Codewiz]

My father-in-law came down and helped me install bamboo flooring in my living room and dining room. About 600sqft for the two rooms and foyer. It took all of Saturday and Sunday to lay the floor. I still have some finishing work and clean up to do.

Here are some pictures of the floor.

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As requested by Sagalore:

Up close pictures.

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[Jzero]

Looks sharp....are they the pergo-style tongue-and-groove, or did you have to nail/glue them down?

 

[radioouman]

Bamboo? Where do you live?

 

[loup garou]

Looks great! I like the dark finish. :thumbsup:

 

[SagaLore]

Wow, that looks really nice. I would never have thought you could get a bamboo-based wood floor like that. I actually like that better than some of the other hardwood floors I've seen.

Can you come over and do my house next?

 

[dullard]

Looks nice. I've always wanted to put down bamboo myself but haven't had the excuse (ie spare money sitting around and no time on my hands).

I installed laminate wood flooring in my bathroom this weekend. I had a few boxes sitting around from when I put the floor in my wife's dance studio and finally came up with an idea of how to use them. New wood flooring just makes any room look so much better.

 

[SagaLore]

Originally posted by: Codewiz
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Can you get us a picture of the flooring close up, so we can really see the texture and pattern of it?

 

[iamwiz82]

Looks good.

 

[Codewiz]

The bamboo is tongue and groove. I am on a concrete slab so finding flooring that met my needs was tough. It was pretty much laminate, engineered hardwood, or this bamboo flooring. It was put down by glueing the tongue and groove with bruce's everseal floating floor glue.

It was a mess to put down and was very time consuming. You can get bamboo flooring that has locking tongue and grooves. If I had to do over, I probably would have gone that route because it was much easier. My issue was that it costs about $0.75/sqft more than what I got.

The only saving grace was that the boards were 6' long and 6" wide.

 

[snoopdoug1]

very nice!

 

[Albis]

A+ work. it looks really great

 

[vi edit]

Good stuff. :thumbsup:

We just bought a house and unfortunately didn't have a lot of control in the floor covering. The builder didn't allow for the option of putting in wood flooring like we would have preferred in some of the living areas.

I'm still considering pulling up the brand new carpet in the dining area and putting down something similar to what you have. It just adds more class to the place plus makes for a much better cleanup than carpet does. Especially in dinining areas.

 

[Codewiz]

Originally posted by: vi_edit
Good stuff. :thumbsup:

We just bought a house and unfortunately didn't have a lot of control in the floor covering. The builder didn't allow for the option of putting in wood flooring like we would have preferred in some of the living areas.

I'm still considering pulling up the brand new carpet in the dining area and putting down something similar to what you have. It just adds more class to the place plus makes for a much better cleanup than carpet does. Especially in dinining areas.

We had 13 year old carpet when we bought the house in December. The carpet was amazingly in great shape. However, our brand new washer overflowed. GE gave us money to replace to damaged carpet. We just put that money towards putting the floor down. So overall the bad washer was a disaster and a blessing at the same time

We were planning to put flooring in at some point in the future, we just didn't expect to do it within 6 months of moving into the house

 

[purbeast0]

looks very nice man, good job :thumbsup:

 

[mikepeck]

Nice!! Where'd you get the bamboo flooring? And is it the carbonized (smoked) version? I really like the color!

 

[UpGrD]

This is my weekend job. This a newer laminant system and by far the best If seen. I'm an old hand at laminant flooring and with my new house I have decided to go with this. I snaped together a box of this flooring in my kitchen and was simply blown away by how this stuff looks. You get the looks of wood with the low maint of laminate. I picked up $3k worth this weekend!!!
A bamboo floor was a close second though.................

 

[Codewiz]

Originally posted by: mikepeck
Nice!! Where'd you get the bamboo flooring? And is it the carbonized (smoked) version? I really like the color!

Yeah it is vertical carbonized. My wife and I considered the natural but decided that our room got so much light that the carbonized would look better.

We purchased from fairpacific.com

My only problem with the whole deal was shipping damage. The flooring was shipped via FedEx freight. Oh my what a disaster. Our of 16 boxes, 5 were damaged. 2 of the 5 damaged so that 90% of the boards were ruined.

We got 2 new replacement boxes shipped to us. Both of them damaged. However the damage wasn't bad enough to warrant getting them replaced.

 

[Codewiz]

Originally posted by: UpGrD
This is my weekend job. This a newer laminant system and by far the best If seen. I'm an old hand at laminant flooring and with my new house I have decided to go with this. I snaped together a box of this flooring in my kitchen and was simply blown away by how this stuff looks. You get the looks of wood with the low maint of laminate. I picked up $3k worth this weekend!!!
A bamboo floor was a close second though.................

My only concern with laminate is the problem is deep scratches. Get a couple of those and you are toast. I will say that it definately tough. I just wanted the ability to refinish in the future if the need arise.

 

[labgeek]

We're looking at doing this now in the new house and have been strongly considering bamboo... My problem with most of the laminate floors is they look like laminate not like wood. The house I grew up in has hardwood parquet flooring, and the house I have for sale in Louisiana has Heart Pine flooring. All but the best laminates just don't look right to me.

Nice job btw...

 

[Aharami]

wow. love that dark wood floor and light colored walls. very classy look

 

[UpGrD]

Originally posted by: Codewiz

Originally posted by: UpGrD
This is my weekend job. This a newer laminant system and by far the best If seen. I'm an old hand at laminant flooring and with my new house I have decided to go with this. I snaped together a box of this flooring in my kitchen and was simply blown away by how this stuff looks. You get the looks of wood with the low maint of laminate. I picked up $3k worth this weekend!!!
A bamboo floor was a close second though.................

My only concern with laminate is the problem is deep scratches. Get a couple of those and you are toast. I will say that it definately tough. I just wanted the ability to refinish in the future if the need arise.

The great thing about the 'click' style laminate is the you can simply un-click up to the damaged piece and replace it. You should always get an extra box when you buy in order to have replacement planks from the same lot (color). But my old house had laminate throughout and I only had 1 instance where a repair was needed. In that case I simply used a color matched epoxy style wood putty which fixed it perfectly. In most cases a stain marker will repair any scratches.

 

[UpGrD]

Originally posted by: labgeek
We're looking at doing this now in the new house and have been strongly considering bamboo... My problem with most of the laminate floors is they look like laminate not like wood. The house I grew up in has hardwood parquet flooring, and the house I have for sale in Louisiana has Heart Pine flooring. All but the best laminates just don't look right to me.

Nice job btw...

Cheap laminate will look cheap, spend the money and get the quality flooring. Also do not skimp on the underlayment either. With the cheap underlayment you get that 'hollow' sound and feel. The 3mm rubberized foam works the best (I feel).

 

[mikepeck]

They also have bamboo laminate (Which i was thinking about). But they don't have the carbonized version.
http://www.ifloor.com/productdisplay.html?item_id=289597&N=4%20128

 

[Jzero]

Originally posted by: UpGrD

Originally posted by: Codewiz

Originally posted by: UpGrD
This is my weekend job. This a newer laminant system and by far the best If seen. I'm an old hand at laminant flooring and with my new house I have decided to go with this. I snaped together a box of this flooring in my kitchen and was simply blown away by how this stuff looks. You get the looks of wood with the low maint of laminate. I picked up $3k worth this weekend!!!
A bamboo floor was a close second though.................

My only concern with laminate is the problem is deep scratches. Get a couple of those and you are toast. I will say that it definately tough. I just wanted the ability to refinish in the future if the need arise.

The great thing about the 'click' style laminate is the you can simply un-click up to the damaged piece and replace it.

I've heard this before, and I'm not sure I buy it. If the scratch is in the middle, you could end up taking half the floor apart, and you will probably need to pull off the baseboard/quarter-round while you're at it. Seems like a lot of work.

That said, the stuff is pretty durable....I've found you need a pretty sharp object to scratch it.

 

[Codewiz]

Originally posted by: Jzero

Originally posted by: UpGrD

Originally posted by: Codewiz

Originally posted by: UpGrD
This is my weekend job. This a newer laminant system and by far the best If seen. I'm an old hand at laminant flooring and with my new house I have decided to go with this. I snaped together a box of this flooring in my kitchen and was simply blown away by how this stuff looks. You get the looks of wood with the low maint of laminate. I picked up $3k worth this weekend!!!
A bamboo floor was a close second though.................

My only concern with laminate is the problem is deep scratches. Get a couple of those and you are toast. I will say that it definately tough. I just wanted the ability to refinish in the future if the need arise.

The great thing about the 'click' style laminate is the you can simply un-click up to the damaged piece and replace it.

I've heard this before, and I'm not sure I buy it. If the scratch is in the middle, you could end up taking half the floor apart, and you will probably need to pull off the baseboard/quarter-round while you're at it. Seems like a lot of work.

That said, the stuff is pretty durable....I've found you need a pretty sharp object to scratch it.

Another issue. I got samples of all sorts of laminates, engineered wood and bamboo. I can say for sure that about 25% of the time, when you unclick laminate the locking system can break. You would have to be extremely careful to unclick much of it.

I do agree on going with the higher end underlayment. I went with armstrongs quietstep 3in1 underlayment. $40/100sqft