Bamboo Floor Project Gallery

[drscott]

Here's the Bamboo Floor Project Gallery I promised. Punted the gym today -- I was just too tired.

There are lots of little consequences to changing over to wood floors -- we've had to put felt dots or rubber cups under most of the furniture (so you can slide it without marring the wood) and will be shopping for a nice area rug for under the coffee table, plus a few runners for special situations (like next to the beds and high wear areas.) More shopping fun awaits us. We also had to rip out the built-in shelves in Mike's office, since they interfered with the installation and weren't nice enough to keep permanently, so there's another shopping trip (and Ikea furniture-building session.)

There was so much sawdust on the bottom of the pool I only finished cleaning it today, and I'll put in a new filter since the old one is beyond its design life. These filters are basically big paper filters, rather like a 3' tall car air filter, and after a few years no amount of cleaning will fix them.

Comments

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

I looks wonderful. Don't you love all the trim work you get to do along with the flooring? I feel a certain kinship with the flooring in the second pic - I'm also a product of Tracy, CA.

Skandia from the Container store is also great for shelves. We used it and IKEA in our place.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

I haven't been to a Container store, but they just opened in San Jose, so we'll take a look. The web catalog looks good and they let design your own shelf unit, which is what we need.

You may be from Tracy but I bet you weren't laminated in a Chinese factory. :-)

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

The Design-it-Yourself was the attraction; the shelves held books, printers, & several mini-tower, bookcase, & laptop-sized servers. That and two tables to use as a desk of each of us. And the Container Store was 2 miles away but IKEA was 10.

[excessor.livejournal.com]

Wow, this looks even better than I thought it would! Do you have to do new baseboards?

I'm completely envious.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

Nope, the old philippine mahogany ones stood up to removal -- didn't lose any, and Mike touche dup the finshing as needed before they were reinstalled.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

We had thought of a more grayish carpet, but since the wood is in place, beige is now It.

Now on to the horrors of window replacement, atrium sky covers, kitchen remodelling, and painting the exterior. Eek.

[qbear.livejournal.com]

It's Eichler-rific! Makes me want to rip up our ratty carpeting and put down bamboo.

We're in the process of replacing the outer front door into the atrium. The guy doing it is great--it looks wonderful. All it needs now is paint and our new Modern house numbers.

We'd love to see your Eichler sometime (shamelesly inviting ourselves over). We could do a progressive dinner--very 60's!

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

We also considered what it probably a more practical strategy - bamboo for the living/dining area and berber carpet plus dense pad for the bedrooms. It's hard to find a carpet installer that knows how to select pad for R-Value; almost none of them care if your heating bill is twice as high. The carpet and pad installed here 14 years ago had an R-value of about 4, meaning over those years about $5,000 of gas heat was went into the soil below the concrete pad and not into the house.

If you would consider doing it yourself, I found a good source for well-designed carpet squares -- dense Berber carpet with a rigid plastic integral pad. They have peeloff glue pads on the back, and only a few have to be glued down; plus you can create cool designs with them. While a bit expensive compared to roll carpet, it lets you do one room at a time yourself and allows you to replace a square at a time as booboos happen.

See http://www.interfacefloor.com.

..and I thought you were going to say, "The guy doing it is great--HE looks wonderful." :-)

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

That flooring is simply gorgious. I had the pleasure of hard wood floors in two apartments.

The first apartment with hardwood floors was a 1927 vintage studio apartment who's flooring had been buried under ratty beige carpeting and when the building was slowly being redone for new tenants, they went back to hardwoods, refinishing the original floors. I was lucky as I was able to rip out my carpeting to reveal refinished, and therefore in a lighter stain, probably back in the 50's-60's, and then covered up before too much wear took place. All it needed was a good vaccuum and mopping when uncovered.

The second place was a seudo 1 bedroom, built around the same time and the HW's in there were not in such great shape, even waxing didn't really do it. They simply needed to be refinished.

I'm in an early 60's 1 bedroom that has gray wall to wall carpeting now. I think it may have originaly had parque flooring at one point, now covered with the carpeting. But, it has a wonderful view of Seattle and a balcony. :-)

Love your Eichler, looks to be in great shape.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

When you rent there's not a lot you can do unless you luck out (like finding good floors under carpet.) The parquet you have now is probably the 1/8" thick variety that was common on the 60s-70s; this can only be sanded with great care since it's in such small pieces and so thin. A view, of course, makes up for a lot. :-)

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I simply lucked out with the studio, the second place already had the HW's, but were not in good shape unfortunately.

As for the view, that I do agree it makes up for having carpeting. If you know Seattle at all, I see the East slope, south slope of Queen Anne Hill, the Space Needle from approx the 100Ft level up and can see it exploding with fireworks of New Year's Eve. and if I look over the top of my building (I live on the top, 4 floor of my building) I can see the top 1/3 of the tall downtown/Belltown buildings, the Olympics and some of Puget Sound off to the West and have spectacular sunsets as well. :-)

When I get a photo page built on Geocities, I'll have to post some pics.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

I know Seattle fairly well. I had a chance to buy part of an old Capitol Hill mansion when I was there in 1987 looking around -- instead I moved to Vancouver, BC. You must not be too far from that Thai place on Queene Anne Hill that I liked a lot. If the sun were visible in winter I'd love living there.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I used to live down in the Lower Queen Anne/Updown area for 6 years, but now live on Capitol Hill, just above the freeway, just north of Denny Way. That's partly why the rent is good. :-)

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

I boyght my first car at one of the dealerships at the foot of Denny Way. Ah, memories...

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

It wasn't a honda, now was it? If it was, I'm driving an '88 Accord right now that's a little depraved, but reliable. :-)

[goldibehr.livejournal.com]

The floors look great. I like wood so much better than wall-to-wall carpet.

I can tell from the photos that the flooring "floats" (ie is not attached) on the pad. Do they put glue on both the long and short sides, or is the tongue/groove sufficient to hold the pieces together?

Want to let us know us what parts of the job the contractor charged extra for?

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

I think they glued the ends as well, but I didn't actually observe it.

The installer lowered the sq. ft. rate to $3 when we cut out the dishonest flooring store (it had been $3.50) but then added back $600 for reusing the old baseboard and $300 for carpet and waste disposal, which seemed reasonable. The whole thing ended up costing c. $9/sq. ft. It's likely new customers can get about $1/sq ft shaved off the price of materials because it turns out the installer is an old friend of the guy running the bamboo importers, and he will now be able to buy direct for people who go through him for installation.