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There are many different flooring materials available today including one of the most beautiful and environmentally friendly, a bamboo floor. Bamboo is a great floor product. Its popularity as a flooring option has recently gained momentum recently, driven by the unique look and amazing durability it offers. Bamboo floors rival rock maple in strength and exceed red oak's Janka rating by 25 percent. Another great factor to consider when choosing Bamboo for your floor is expansion and contraction ? Bamboo expands and contracts much less than hardwood floors (by about 50 percent). Better still, bamboo is naturally resistant to insects and moisture.
Since bamboo is technically a grass, you might be wondering how it can be made into a flooring material. The first thing to remember is that bamboo grows very big. Some species reach more than 100 feet tall with diameters of up to a foot in thickness. This definitely isn't your typical grass!
As far as the actual flooring process goes, boards are created when the hollow round shoots of bamboo are sliced into strips. The strips are boiled to remove the starch, then dried and laminated into solid boards. The boards are milled to create workable flooring profiles.
In order to ensure long life, the bamboo strips are treated with a preservative (this can be done before or after the strips are laminated), which brings out the rich color of the flooring for installation. Typically you can get bamboo in either a light, natural color or a darker, amber hue. (The amber comes about when the flooring is pressure steamed; this darkens the surface through the process of carbonization.)
When you are shopping for bamboo hardwood floors you want to keep a few things in mind. First you will need to decide between bamboo flooring and bamboo laminate flooring. These two options are available for most hardwood flooring options. The regular bamboo flooring will be more expensive than the laminate flooring, however, the laminate flooring will tend to slightly easier to install. The second thing that you will want to keep in mind when shopping for bamboo flooring is that you will need to buy all of your flooring in one stop. This is because the color of bamboo varies greatly from growing season to growing season based on the weather conditions and the amount of water that the plants receive. Because of this, your floors will not have a consistent color palette if you buy flooring planks from different bamboo plank batches.
The final thing that you will need to think about when shopping for bamboo is whether you want horizontal or vertical bamboo planks. The direction refers to how the grain of the bamboo lies on the plank.
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