Your floor carries a heavy load at home. This is why choosing the right flooring should not be taken for granted and needs proper planning before purchasing. In deciding what type of flooring, you have to consider the durability, installation, materials and maintenance. But the more crucial decision would be the type of materials you choose for your flooring and your lifestyle of your family.

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Before making the decision, take time to think about being environmentally friendly. Here are a few green flooring options to consider:

Cork

Cork flooring started as a by-product from surplus or scrap from the wine cork industry. The popularity of cork tile flooring increased not because it comes cheap but due to its resiliency. This type of flooring is tolerant to dropped dishes and very comfortable to stand on. Cork also features stain and fire resistance which makes it low in maintenance and more safe. Other notable characteristics of cork floors are the ability to absorb sound and resistance to soak up moisture.

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Bamboo

As you know, bamboo is a fast growing type of grass that is so abundant and looks like wood. It is remarkably durable and can last for a long period of time. There are three distinct bamboo patterns available for your home floors: grain, horizontal and vertical grain. You can also choose between natural and caramel shades.  One of the best features of bamboo is its cool and cozy effects on your home. It absorbs heat and is hard-wearing.

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Linoleum

People often refer this material to vinyl flooring but these two materials are different from each other. Linoleum contains no vinyl and is made from flax seed by-product which is the linseed oil. It is a mixture of sawdust, powdered cork, minerals and pine resin. Although it is a bit expensive than vinyl, you can count on its durability, low maintenance and more importantly biodegradable. But linoleum gained recognition with its antibacterial properties especially when used in healthcare facilities.

Getting the best flooring for your home is one of the major decisions you have to make. You should take some time and be aware of your options. Remember, a healthy home environment is priceless! Use these green flooring ideas to choose the right one for your home and the environment.

For more flooring options on Stagetecture, click here.

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Decorating your home with high quality furniture may take a toll on our environment. Significant amounts of trees are cut every day to accommodate the need for wood furniture. These trees take so many years to grow and will take the same duration for replacement.

Good thing that modern furnishings introduce a collection of innovative green furniture for home and office interiors. These ideas provide similar comfort and style as conventional furniture can offer.  It gives you the experience of luxury and elegance without contributing to the continuous destruction of the environment.

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If you are looking for green furniture for your interiors, consider the following:

Bamboo furniture

Although bamboo is a grass but then it can be a great alternative to wood furniture. It is sturdy and can be customized to fit any design. Bamboo is extremely fast to grow as compared with trees used for furniture. It can match, if not exceed, the furniture made-up of wood and other materials.

Recyclable plastic and metal furniture

Any materials that can be recycled are considered Eco-friendly. While others consider plastic as harmful for the environment, recycling them to produce cutting edge furniture will definitely change their point of view. A growing number of plastic furniture is being manufactured and purchased by many people. Metal furniture also gained a fair share in the market. Metals can easily be recycled to come up with high quality and durable furniture.

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Look for certified sustainable wood

The Forest Stewardship Council is an international organization that promotes sustainable ways to protect the world’s forests. The organization gives certification and seal of approval to any product that uses economically viable materials. This ensures that the product uses materials that are Eco-friendly.

The desire to have stylish and cozy furniture and at the same time help the environment is possible through green furniture. This is a great opportunity to show our concern to the environment and to still have beautiful interiors!

For more green living ideas on Stagetecture, click here.

Wood flooring can be a beautifying finish in your home. Depending on what type of wood you choose, the decision to warm up your interiors with wood flooring can also be a challenge. Bamboo and timber flooring have their own advantages, and our Guest Blogger gives tips for enriching your home with each.

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Foundational to any home, the flooring is what conveys warmth, beauty, and long lasting enjoyment for all who stay or visit. It is the first point of contact in every room and the first thing that is noticed, whether directly or indirectly. The appearance of good flooring engenders a welcoming response both aesthetically and artistically. It is no surprise that the smart choice in floor covering to enhance hearth and home tend toward the hardwoods over carpet, cork, tile or polished concrete. All have their appeal, but few have as many of the additional advantages that bamboo offers, even when compared to timber.

Timber Flooring

Timber flooring exudes elegance and stature, providing a wide range of colors and grain qualities. It also possesses variable densities that are measured for hardness by the Janka Test, which assigns a number relative to a given wood type. The harder the timber, the higher the number it receives in a rating of how dense it is. For example, soft Tasmanian Oak receives a value of 4.9 whereas black-butt has a value of 9.1 as one of the hardest floor covering materials, outside of bamboo.

Bamboo Flooring

For many years now, the new home and renovation markets have been making use of the scratch and dent resistant bamboo flooring that not only compares well in appearance with traditional wood grain and hardwood qualities, but it has many attributes that mark it as an improvement over much of the timber that has been all but used up today.

As the characteristics of timber have changed, the result of clearing forests of supply, bamboo ranks highly among the “green” movement, as it is considered to be a grass that grows quite profusely. Within hours of harvesting the material, bamboo is already replenishing itself again, growing as much as three foot in a single day and able to reproduce mature material in as little as 3-5 years, contrasting with the 30 years it takes to reforest timber. Regrowth occurs in place, eliminating the need to replant in continually expansive territory. As a more sustainable material option, bamboo has gained in popularity.

Compared to timber flooring, bamboo possesses a stunning wood grain that achieves an exquisite finish that only gets better with time through sanding and polishing for a traditional finish. Bamboo is actually 70% harder than jarrah (rated at 8.5) and is far more adaptable to conditions of humidity. Bamboo flooring uniquely acclimatises in various environments without twisting, warping or buckling. It is a premium choice for use in kitchens and bathrooms, as it naturally resists attacks of mold and mildew. It is also less appealing to insects as the manufacturing process successfully destroys the starch content in the wood. Bamboo can be fabricated in layers the same way plywood is produced making it very easy to install. Available in classic tongue and groove strips, it can be permanently attached to the surface upon which it sits.

If you want beautiful and resilient bamboo flooring in your home, Bamboozle are Western Australia’s premier bamboo flooring suppliers and bamboo flooring installation experts. Contact Bamboozle to request an obligation free quote.

For more hardwood flooring ideas on Stagetecture, click here.

Happy DIY Saturday! For those of you that are contemplating the decision to install hardwood floors in your home, whether its for the aesthetic, family members have allergies, or you want a change in your home, today we are talking about protecting your hardwood floors.

If you already have hardwood floors, here’s a You Tube video on keeping them shiny without developing a buildup and our Guest Blogger, gives tips for protecting hardwood floors from moisture damage.

Guest Blogger: How to Protect your Hardwood Flooring from Moisture Damage

Irrespective of how robust hardwood floors are they are prone to damage, which is triggered on by extreme climatic changes. Moisture is the biggest threat to hardwood floor products. Hence as a homeowner you should ensure that any spill on your hardwood floor should be cleaned up before it seeps into the layers of wood. Moisture as a result of a spill if left neglected can gradually destroy the surface of your hardwood floor.

Hardwood floor products

Hardwood floor products tend to absorb a lot of moisture. Since they are a product of nature, hardwood floors react to variations in temperature and humidity. Typically hardwood floor products tend to absorb moisture and swell up when there is a high amount of humidity. During the winter season however, hardwood floors lose moisture and tend to contract. Once you understand how this happens you would be able to prevent the seasonal changes to your hardwood flooring.

During the biting winters the air is usually dry due to the internal heating in your home. Hardwood floor products tend to lose moisture during the cold season and contract as a result. This leads to the development of thin gaps between the planks of your flooring. Nothing to be alarmed about however, as this typically happens with every hardwood floor during the winter season. With the onset of spring, the moisture levels increase and the gaps formed between the planks close on their own.

In the summer time, the levels of humidity within your home can soar as high as 90%. The rise in humidity affects hardwood floor products and they tend to absorb the moisture present in the air and swell up. The swelling is quite prominent and you will notice that the edges of your hardwood floor products are much higher than its center. This phenomenon is called cupping. Spilt water can also cause cupping to occur as the wood absorbs the moisture and expands. It would take a while for your hardwood floor to flatten itself out on its own after the natural moisture within the wood gets restored.

So how do you prevent cupping from taking place? The moment you notice that your hardwood floor is expanding and the edges are higher than its surface; you should immediately try and figure out the source of the moisture. Cupping can occur due to indoor humidity, flooding or even a plumbing leak. Once the source of moisture is removed, your hardwood floor can be restored back to normal with proper sanding. This would smoothen out the edges and have your precious hardwood floor looking immaculate again.

National Hardwood Flooring is an online retailer of fine hardwood products.

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Last week I had a guest blogger on from EZ Slide Cabinet Hardware, and this week I thought I’d have a guest blogger on that

showcases kitchen cabinetry. Not just any kitchen cabinetry, but bamboo – that is eco-friendly, renews quickly in nature and is gorgeous to the touch and eye.

Guest blogger Joseph Freenor from CFT411 – Cabinet and Furniture and Information, shows us how a California cabinetry maker utilizes eco-friendly bamboo in their beautiful cabinetry. By the way, Joseph is a wonderful cabinet maker too!

I don’t normally write about other cabinetmakers, and I extra especially do not write about cabinetmakers in Southern California who aren’t named Joe, but every now and again, something comes along that makes a firm rule develop a bit of flexibility. And Laguna Bamboo is very much a case in point. What first piques my interest in them is their use of bamboo, as my partner uses this material whenever he can, such as in his bamboo shoe benches—and does so for the same reason that Laguna Bamboo does so. It is environmentally sound, by which we mean that the use of it does little or no damage to the environment.

Any forest, once cut, requires replenishment, and under the right circumstances, this can be arranged. A hardwood forest of oak, for example, once harvested is not forever lost. It can be re-grown. The problem, though, is that it takes many decades for this forest to re-grow, and if it is to be characterized as “old growth,” it must be left alone until the growth is old—several centuries. Bamboo, by way of distinct contrast, reaches full growth in four years! That is not a misprint, not a forty or four hundred that somehow became a four. It is four years.

Laguna Bamboo 3 The other part of the equation that makes bamboo particularly attractive is that it is both very hard and very capable of being shaped into a product that is usable by woodworkers. When we first started this website I wrote a lengthy nine-blog dissertation on the need for bamboo plywood and its many uses, but let me just summarize that here by saying that it is now possible to get plywood sheets that are not plywood at all in the traditional sense of the word. They are made up of bamboo that has been sliced into strips and glued into sheets. These sheets are then glued together just as traditional plywood would be—each sheet positioned at 90° to the preceding sheet—and the result is actually stronger than regular plywood because bamboo is so hard. It can be milled like wood, finished like wood, and used like wood, but it does not grow like wood. At four years of age bamboo is harvested. The mighty oak tree at that age, by way of distinct contrast, is mostly just thinking about becoming an oak one day. You might also check out my partner Joe Dusel’s discussion on bamboo plywood.

These pictures, as I indicated earlier, are from Laguna Bamboo, and those of our readers who are in the Orange County area may want to check out this company for their kitchen projects. But I cannot close this blog without urging my San Diego area readers to check out Woodistry, as my partner has also done a lot of innovative work with this product. That’s the thing with an idea whose time has come. No one ever corners the market on it!

For more echo-friendly ideas on Stagetecture, click here.