Question about hardwood flooring

J,
You might want to look at some of the do it your self web sites and get the low down on the flooring available.
I’ve used the laminate on a house that I was selling. It went down quick and easy, had a 25 year warranty, and looked ok, but since it wasn’t real wood, I couldn’t bring myself to use it in my new house.
I’m going with the engineered hardwood flooring, which is basically hardwood plywood, with a top layer of whatever wood flavor you’re after. We chose oak. The reason I went with engineered versus solid hardwood, was I could glue it directly to the cement slab, and not have to worry about moisture issues, or wood movement or buckling, etc. My house has a slab that is well above grade (18”) which is one of the stipulations of gluing it to the slab floor.
With solid hardwood, the flooring should be nailed to sleepers, if over concrete. In your case, you could get away with nailing to the plywood floor, if your floor is in good condition and doesn’t have any “soft” spots in it. If the carpet buckling in being caused by subfloor problems, you would want to get those fixed first.

-- Tim - http://www.tmuli.com

Laminate is easy to do yourself and it comes with a hard finish. The floor floats. I think this is the cheapest of all. Engineered is more stable than solid, but you almost need a professional to lay it. This too comes prefinished. The finish is harder than what you put on if you do it in place. Solid is really nice, I used it at my house. I used red oak common select at my house. I used a professional installer, but finished it myself with tung and polyurethane.
!!

-- http://www.twinoaksgrowers.com

Hardwood will increase the value because it can be refinished a number of times over many years. Engineered is engineered. You get what you pay for. Engineered is for diy-ers. I look at store-bought engineered as the same as linoleum ( did I just date myself.)

Nail hardwood directly to floor with plywood. I would glue using Bostik on the concrete.

Normal store bought flooring is 3/4”.

You could go to a mill and have anything you want turned into flooring. 1/4 sawn white oak is pretty spiffy. We installed some in a straw bale that they snaggeg from an old school and had the beams resawn.

Personally I like bamboo. Harder than oak, almost as hard as hickory. It can look like a bowling alley though. But, I still like it. You’ll need a better finish for it. It doesn’t take just any finish.

-- arborial reconfiguration specialist

Catspaw,

Talk to me about bamboo. What is it about bamboo that you like?

I saw some bamboo, that was almost an off-white in colour, without having the bleached look. That would really fit in nicely. How expensive is it? Is it hard to install?

Would I have to put in a subfloor in the basement area to put bamboo on top of the concrete?

-- jroot

Sorry, forgot to mention bamboo.
We did look at this for our house, but it did not fit our farmhouse style.

-- http://www.twinoaksgrowers.com

It’s about the same cost as other hardwood flooring [now.] LumberLiquidators always advertises it but you have to know the quality. I’m sure they’re not selling the quality stuff.

There are four combos. Flat, vertical “grain”, natural, and honey color.

I’ll post a pic very soon of bare flat.

We installed it over concrete on a second floor with glue. I don’t know what a basement floor would do as far as moisture or anything. I got mine from Timbergrass….(left overs from this job.)

I do know that Bostik is insidiously strong, flexible, etc.

I just like bamboo….you can eat it, make tools, chairs, tables, musical instruments, scaffolding, tiki torches, screens, blinds, etc. ....oh yea….and flooring. Installs same as normal solid flooring.

-- arborial reconfiguration specialist

So here’s some raw bamboo flooring…

and again

the other stuff is vertical or on edge. That’s a bit busy for me. Wish I had pics of the floor we did in that renovation. Honey is darker much like a burnt honey color. It seems these are the two main colors it comes in, raw or honey. The two pics are of the same board, different lighting, both unfinished.

I like seeing the joints (as in finger joints) in the wood. You don’t see that in the vertical.

-- arborial reconfiguration specialist

I’d like to use Bamboo, renewable resource et al, but I tend to agree with you about the joints / ends. What you’ve shown in your last picture is what I’ve seen locally here.

Maybe I am just used to the harder joints, but I am not fussy on this look. It reminds me of the wild bamboo we had growing in our garden in our old place. Damn stuff, we would cut down twice a year, and it would be over our head in no time at all, covered with bees when it was in flower, and I’m allergic to bee stings.

-- jroot

J, should have got yourself a panda bear to take care of the bamboo :]

-- Tim - http://www.tmuli.com

Something just struck me about what you said or maybe how you siad it or maybe what I said.

This stuff is standard T&G. I shouldn’t have refered to the “joints” as finger joints (as in how engineered 2×4’s are sometimes finger jointed into long lengths.) I almost sounded like I was saying the boards had finger joints on the edges and that’s how they would be placed on the floor edge to edge.

These particular boards are about 6’ long and about 4-5” wide. The “joints” I was refering to are the Knuckle joints in the actual bamboo plant (which you don’t really see with the Edge or vertical grain stuff.)

These boards are engineered like plywood but all bamboo (I think about three layers and 3/4” thick.) The bamboo strips are about an inch or so wide each, so each board looks like four or five flat bamboo strips edge glued together with the knuckles randomly staggered.

Was that a clarification?

-- arborial reconfiguration specialist

TenonTim, are you sniffing Tung Oil again?

-- http://www.twinoaksgrowers.com

Yes, Catspaw, that is indeed clarification. Good explanation. I did realize that they were tongue and groove boards.

It is the width of the boards, and those apparent endings that bother me about the bamboo. See circles below:

Can one still find the narrow hardwood boards like “the olden days” when I was growing up? .. the ones about 1.5 – 2 inch wide boards? Is so, are they a pain to install?

-- jroot

Go to LumberLiquidators. They have better pics that you can enlarge. They also have the colors and what not.

“Carbonized”, that’s what I couldn’t remember, not honey color.

Not seeing narrow boards anywhere.

No more of a pain than any other hardwood flooring.

-- arborial reconfiguration specialist

Is LumberLiquidators a totally American distributor or are there stores in Canada? It was not clear when I checked them out. I thought I saw one for Canada, but it took me to a dead end. ... just curious.

-- jroot

I think all their stores are in the lower 48. But, I’m assuming the the natural thing to do if you’re going to deal on the internet, you’d be set-up to ship to other countries. That’s assuming they have more than one brain cell. [that’s my snide remark for LL.]

I’m betting that you could look up a flooring company locally and I bet they’d have bamboo. It’s getting too common/popular not to carry it.

I’d have to say that specialty flooring companies are not always super high priced compared to the big box stores.

[Sidebar]
I’m going to floor my second floor bathroom with the excess bamboo I snaked from a job and use the excess as panels in the cabinetry. I also snaked some free super expensive antique Robin’s egg blue Crane plumbing fixtures to be used there also( I actually hate robin’s egg blue, but it will work.) I might actually build it one of these days.

Yea, o.k. checked their site. They probably don’t have any canadien stores, but, they do ship anywhere. Doesn’t help much if you wants to go see.

-- arborial reconfiguration specialist

Do you have Home Depot? I was in our local one this weekend and they had bamboo flooring for stupid cheap.
I don’t know if it was just the local store trying to unload what they had or their regular price.

-- Tim - http://www.tmuli.com

Yes, we do have Home Depot in Guelph. I’ll check it out today. Thanks.

-- jroot