Low Impact

The new bamboo flooring installed

Our new place had been a rental for the last few years, and a little TLC is definitely called for.  So before we make any massive changes, we’ve decided to give it a bit of a “face lift” by way of new floors, fresh paint, and new light fittings.  I’ll post about all these things over the coming weeks, and some of the things we’re factoring in to our decisions.  But first stop, (and the first thing completed!) is the flooring.

The first thing to consider is whether you really need to replace the flooring.  Typically the “greenest” option is not to consume resources in the first place, so if you can avoid throwing out old flooring and buying something new, you’ll have a lower environmental impact.

In our case, the house had carpet that had been water damaged in the past and wasn’t in great nick.  But more important is the dust factor.  My wife is allergic to dust mites and some sort of hard flooring is going to really help in keeping the dust down.

One option is to polish up the floorboards that are already there.  In our case, the house has softwood pine flooring which is pretty scuffed and dented.  It’s also pretty uneven with a lot of gaps for drafts to flow in, and different levels where old extensions hadn’t met the existing floor line.  So we opted to go with a covering over the existing floor boards.

The original carpet that was replaced with the bamboo

We ended up choosing bamboo.  Truth be told, I’ve been looking into bamboo as a flooring option for a while, and this was a great opportunity to stop reading about it, and get it installed!

Bamboo is a great green option if you’re leaning towards timber flooring.  It looks just like wood (see the photos on this post), even though it’s technically a grass.  It also grows incredibly rapidly, with a typical plantation being ready for harvest in 5 years or so, rather than the 20+ years for more traditional timber plantations.  Those quicker harvest times mean quicker turnover, so less acreage is needed.  In terms of hardness, there are a range of styles available that are approximately equivalent to jarrah all the way up to the equivalent  hardness of ironbark!

The biggest environmental downside is probably the transport-related emissions.  I was only able to find flooring sourced from China – I didn’t come across any from Australian-based plantations (although there are Australian plantations out there).  So, there’s going to be more transport-related emissions for my bamboo flooring than from wood sourced from an Australian plantation.

In terms of styles, you’re likely to come across 3 basic variations:

• Horizontal, where the bamboo is sliced up into little planks that are laid horizontally – this shows the natural “knots” or segments in the bamboo to great effect, and is usually of moderate hardness.

• Vertical, similar to the horizontal, but the planks are laid vertically – this has more of a fine grain appearance and has similar hardness to Horizontal

• Woven, where the bamboo is spliced into threads that are then compressed together  – this gives a very wood like appearance, and can be very hard.

We ended up choosing the woven bamboo.  I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to find stockists – a search on the Yellow Pages quickly threw up a few businesses.  As always, it pays to get multiple quotes.  We encountered a big range in both expertise and in pricing.  As a guideline, in 2008 when we went looking, we encountered prices from around $80 a square metre to $140 a square metre, fully laid.  This is going to vary based on (among other things) the variety of bamboo, where you live, the surface that you’re laying it on, the preparation required, and the installer’s own margins.  I’ve also spoken to people who installed it themselves – its apparently pretty straightforward, and a good way to save some money.

Installation was a combination of glues and invisible nails.  There’s going to be some amount of off-gassing from the glues that you’re probably best avoiding right after the installation.  We weren’t living in the premises during or straight after the install, but we certainly noticed the smell of glue for a few days after the install on our visits.

You can see the finished result in the photos – we’re really happy with the results.  Of course, only time will tell how it stands up to day-to-day living, we’ll keep you posted!

Categories: DIY, environment, green, housing

Tags: bamboo, carpet, flooring, renovation