Bamboo Flooring – Kitchen Floors

If you are looking to use eco-friendly bamboo flooring, kitchen floors are just perfect! Bamboo flooring is beautiful, trendy and holds up well to daily use so having it in your kitchen can be a great way to keep your kitchen design green.

Bamboo is actually a grass and it grows very quickly so it is a renewable resource. Unlike an Oak tree which may take 120 years to grow big enough to produce boards for your kitchen floor, bamboo grows to maturity in three to seven years. It’s not harmed by harvesting and self propagates via rhizomes which spread underground.

You can get bamboo flooring for your kitchen in a variety of colors. It can be left in a lighter natural color or carbonized to achieve the dark amber color. This carbonizing actually reduces the hardness of the floor so you might want to think twice about this for kitchen flooring. However if you want a bit of color on your floor it can be dyed to achieve a different tone. Bear in mind, however that the graining of bamboo is not like other woods so it won’t take a stain like pine or oak. If you are considering staining your bamboo floor, you’d best do some experimenting on scrap pieces first.

Bamboo Flooring Kitchen Installation

Installing bamboo flooring is the same as installing other kinds of wood flooring. It comes from the factory prefinished and can be glued or nailed but be advised that most of it uses a urea formaldehyde adhesive during the lamination process. You urea formaldehyde is known to be harmful to indoor air quality, but all flooring uses it and bamboo uses a smaller amount.

Just like other types of wood, you’ll want to leave your bamboo inside the kitchen for a few days to let it acclimate to the temperature and humidity before you install it.

Most bamboo manufacturers tout that it is harder than your typical hardwood flooring, however the hardness of your bamboo depends on the species of grass that is used as well as the aged it is when it is harvested. Most of the bamboo that we get in the US comes from the Hunan Province in southern China and is actually harvested from natural plantation groves.

If you are considering bamboo flooring for your kitchen, you want to be sure that it is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council so as to be sure that the bamboo is grown responsibly, without the use of pesticides and meets the criteria for sustainability.

Green And Gorgeous Recycled Countertops

While the word recycled countertops might conjure up images of boring and utilitarian counter spaces, today’s green counters made from recycled glass are anything but. Coming in a wide range of color palettes, these countertops with embedded shards of colorful and beautiful glass give a unique look to any kitchen.

The pieces of glass, once having productive lives as stemware, traffic lights, soda bottles, windshields and the like, have been repurposed to live a second life right inside your countertop. The result is a beautiful mosaic which is functional and, of course, good for the environment.

These recycled countertops are made by a few manufacture others – Vetrazzo and IceStone are two of the most prominent ones. They are made by embedding glass and concrete and can actually be used on walls and floors in addition to counters. There’s a huge array of color choices because the concrete can be colored to suit any palate. Some countertops have only one color glass while others focus on all different colors for unique and colorful display.

You can get counters that have large chunks of glass for a very organic and funky look or ones with smaller chunks that seem a bit more traditional.

If you’re picturing an ugly concrete block with broken shards of glass sticking out, this is not what they look like. They are beautiful and polished with pieces of glass embedded at different layers for three-dimensional look. Over at Vetrazzo the color samples included a subtle clear embedded in white, beautiful cobalt blue, green, brown’s and a beautiful mixture of all different colors in a white background.

The interesting thing about these recycled countertops is that each one is different. The glass which comes from recycling plants is broken up into different sized shards and, much like snowflakes, no two are alike. So if you want a countertop that is unique, interesting and, of course, green you might want to check out some of these recycled glass counter tops – you can find them on the web and specialty showrooms in your town.

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