Any house or public building is going to have some flooring in it. A building’s flooring may often be taken for granted, but damaged, dirty, or warped flooring will quickly gather some unwanted attention. Any responsible homeowner or public building manager will hire contractors to put down new floorboards, whether they be traditional hardwood planks or their new competitor: different types of bamboo flooring. Premium bamboo flooring can match traditional hardwoods in many ways, and bamboo hardwood flooring may be tough, attractive, and easy to maintain for most homeowners. The cost of bamboo flooring may vary, but overall, the cost of bamboo flooring may be close to that of hardwood, giving bamboo a place in the market. This eco-friendly material can do a lot of good for environmental protection as well, making it an attractive option for many. When the cost of bamboo flooring is fair, a homeowner may decide that it’s time for bamboo.
Flooring
When a home or a building is still being constructed, many different crews will be on hand to install and built its many components. This will, of course, include flooring contractors, and they often work with hardwood flooring. Hardwood species such as cherry, oak, and more are found across North America and have been popular for construction and furniture from the colonial era to today. In fact, not only is the flooring industry a robust one, but it is growing as well. Many flooring contractors, sales centers, manufacturers, and more have been interviewed and many expect growth around 3% per year for the coming years. About one in three of these surveyed professionals expected even more growth in the coming years, closer to 8%. Anyone who needs new floors put down may call upon their expertise, but today, they may be using bamboo more and more. Environmental protection efforts are present in many industries, and this includes those that work with wood. Recycled and reclaimed wood is being used more than ever, and bamboo stands to replace many hardwood floors to ease the strain on natural forests from logging. And if the cost of bamboo flooring is fair, this allows bamboo planks to easily compete with hardwood.
On Bamboo
Can bamboo really be made into flooring? If it is processed and treated correctly, then it certainly can. This woody plant, technically a grass, grows in much of Asia and is known for growing rapidly after its first few years of life. Bamboo grows slowly when first planted, but after its first harvest, this plant can grow much faster than the hardwood trees that it competes with. A given plant can be harvested multiple times, and this means that natural habitat destruction is kept to a minimum. In short, bamboo is highly renewable, and helps protect hardwood forests.
Bamboo is harvested, and then woody stalked are then sliced and shredded in processing plants and turned into fibers. These fibers are then compressed into planks with heat, pressure, and adhesives to form the final product. These bamboo planks can then be shipped to customers such as the United States, Canada, and more. It should be noted that good bamboo will be close to hardwood planks in price; if the cost of bamboo flooring is unusually low, then the planks are probably cheap cast-off material that the consumer may not like.
Bamboo can be installed as flooring like any other hardwood, and once in place, it is durable, attractive, and easy to maintain. Bamboo can be mopped clean, and if it suffers scratches, the owner can easily sand down the surface and refinish it to remove those scratches. Bamboo may afford a space a clean, refined look, and may appeal most to younger homeowners and to modern art museums, just to name a few examples. Such bamboo can also be carbonized to dark it and offer a wider selection of colors.
Bamboo floor owners should be aware that this material comes in a relatively narrow range of colors, despite the carbonizing process. What is more, bamboo reacts poorly to extremes of humidity in the environment. Very dry air can make it shrink and crack, and very humid air may cause bamboo planks to expand and twist out of shape. Moderate climates are ideal for installing bamboo planks.