Bamboo floors were one of the things I knew that I definitely wanted.  I was trying to be ecofriendly.  I also knew that I didn’t want what you think of as bamboo floors, that yellowish that looks like pieces of bamboo stuck together.  I also didn’t want anything to be monotone.  Monotone makes me cringe.  So we went with a medium/dark brown wood cabinet.  This meant that our flooring could not be dark.  And I didn’t want anything yellowish.  

We went to Lumber Liquidators and I got all kinds of samples.  I laid everything out and it was a very difficult decision.  Floating or nail down?  Color?  And then once you pick a color sometimes you have to decide on whether you want it to be smooth or strand.  The person at the store was helpful with this decision.  Apparently the smooth is more likely to get scratched and on the strand it is less noticeable if it happens to scratch.  With two wild boys, I chose the strand.  

I ended up finding a bamboo that was itself multi-tonal.  It was beautiful.  Since my house was longer than wide, I hadthe flooring laid with the width, thus making the room appear wider.  I absolutely loved the way it looked when itwas laid.  It was gorgeous.

Then we started living on it. We found that even though they said that it was supposed to be sturdy that it scratched very easily.  In the few years that we lived there, we putin lots of scratches just from little things like pulling a chair out.  It did not live up to our expectations of sturdiness.

So yes, I loved it and am glad that I chose it for that project, but when it came time to rebuild after the fire, I knew that I did not want to go with it again.

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