Staying busy is important.
If you are one of the minions of people in America who are sending their youngest children off to college, you may be facing a difficult transition. The strategy to dealing with a home that is now more empty than full, it is important to find a way to stay occupied. For many people, one way to fill the extra amounts of time is to tackle a home remodeling project. And while all college counselors will warn parents from changing or emptying a student’s empty bedroom in the first year of college, there are many other areas in the home that might benefit from this attention. From kitchen to bathroom remodeling plans, in fact, many empty nest parents can channel their free time to a worthwhile effort that will add value to your current home.
Once you have decided on what areas of your home you are going to focus on, it is likely that you will need to make your first decisions about flooring. From learning how to install bamboo flooring yourself if you have both skill and the time to understanding the latest engineered bamboo product options that can be professionally installed, it is important to realize that there are many new sustainable flooring products that are easy to maintain if they are properly installed.
Engineered Bamboo Flooring Reviews Continue to Boast an Increasingly Popular Flooring Option
Bamboo flooring manufacturers offer a number of sustainable products that provide easy to maintain surfaces. Compared to traditional wood flooring materials made from hardwood trees can take as long as twenty years or more to reach maturity. In comparison, bamboo is made from natural vegetation. The bamboo plant is a highly renewable resource that grows to maturity in as little as three to five years. Consider some of these other facts and figures about the engineered bamboo flooring industry as well as other new products that are on the market:
- Bamboo roots are fibrous and thin like big grass roots and can go down two to three feet.
- Growing faster than newly planted ones, older, more established bamboo plants are those that have at least three years in the ground.
- A test measuring the force required to embed an 11.28 millimeter (0.444 inch) steel ball into wood to half its diameter (0.222 inch), the Janka test is often used to deduce bamboo and other flooring hardness levels. This method results in an indention 100 square millimeters in size.
- The great majority of strand woven eucalyptus and bamboo lots tend to be in the 3,000 to 4,000 Janka range.
- Strand woven bamboo and eucalyptus flooring have average Janka ratings of 3,800 or higher.
- Although engineered bamboo floors can only be refinished up to two times, strand woven solid bamboo floors can be refinished to to four times.
If you and your spouse are looking for ways to stay busy now that your children have flown from the nest, you might consider looking to the trees, literally, for a home flooring project that will keep you busy, while adding to the value of your home at the same time.
