I'm going to think of this forum as "Homeownerforge" as well. We're looking at putting down bamboo for our kitchen floor. Anyone with experience want to chime in with a "heck yeah" or a "hell no?"
I wish I could say I've had the experience of bamboo floors! I just know I love them, and want them in my home.
One: do you want wood floors in your kitchen? If yes, you will probably like them. If, however, you prefer tile in your kitchen, then you probably won't.
Myself personally, I would never go for a wood floor in a kitchen. Tile or synthetics. That said, bamboo is gorgeous, sustainable, and fairly durable. Also supposed to be easy to work with.
Talked with a friend who was thinking about bamboo floors in the kitchen and she was told NOT to put them in the kitchen because they were too soft to take the traffic. It one insisted on bamboo wooden floors you have to have a really thick underfloor of and then a really thick coating of polyurithane (?) to seal it.
One advantage of wood in the kitchen is that it's soft. Bamboo might be too soft, but the hardwood floors in my house have just a bit of give, so, for example, a dropped glass usually doesn't break. I don't think that would be true of tile.
This is the main criticism I knew of from personal experience (we put down bamboo floor in my parents' house and it's super soft). I think different kinds of bamboo flooring have different hardnesses, but even looking at reviews of one brand online, you get all the way from "it was so soft and got dinged up easily" to "my dogs and kids run all over it and drop things all the time and it's so much better." We went to the flooring store last night to look at options, and they say for this climate, bamboo tends to not do so well because it doesn't react well to annual changes in humidity. We go from about zero humidity in the winter to near 100% humidity in the summer, and the claim is that bamboo never shrinks after it expands (or never expands after it shrinks) like real wood does. Hogwash? Right now we're looking at manufactured hardwood (essentially plywood): http://www.carpetone.com/catalog/detail.asp?category=hardwood&p=/p/81144/ This is different than laminate, which has that soft filler on the inside, but not a solid board. Now the question is installation (which I'll ask today), since it has regular tongue-and-groove rather than snap-together.
Son-in-law installed it in their kitchen on the East Coast (climate extremes, but not quite as severe as yours) about five years ago as a "floating floor." Two dogs (one of whom weighs 60 pounds) and two kids and not a ding so far. Maybe the "float factor" is the key. Not sure of the engineering involved, but the floor feels cushioned when you step on it. FWIW.
When I first saw this thread, my eyes glitched and I thought it was in The Workshop. The title would make for a pretty interesting poem. Bamboo would make nice flooring, but I'd think it should be placed strategically. If you have a "no shoes indoors" rule, though, that could extend the longevity of any indoor flooring.
We're also redoing our floors. While we will do tile in the kitchen we did do an engineered bamboo upstairs already. We started in our 5 year old's room and it has been extremely durable. She has a desk chair she slides around on and it hasn't left a scratch. It also goes down really fast. Full disclosure, my wife is the one who is doing this project. She did the room in just over a day, including the padding and the cuts. Anyway, if you want the model # we purchased I can post it. It was from Lumber Liquidators. Good luck.
We decided against the bamboo in the kitchen and are going with a scraped hickory engineered (plywood rather than full boards or laminate). Should be here in a week, maybe I'll post photos. Apparently you can float this stuff if you glue it together.
If you install tile, you will need to install backer board too. We used 3/4" hardy backer board. This is typical for installing any type of flooring that has more weight than carpet on older floors. We probably didn't have to do this - our house is much better built than newer houses, structurally. The subflooring is 2" thick oak.
Holy buckets! We have a weird situation in the kitchen. The adjoining rooms are hardwood, the kitchen is vinyl over what appears to be linoleum, but the surface is the same level as the hardwood in the other rooms, which means there must be extra subfloor in the kitchen to make the elevations line up.
Our kitchen floors are higher than the rest of our floors. We put a nice three-quarter inch oak threshold in the doorways to mask the height difference. It's the thing I dislike about our house the most, to be honest.
We had engineered flooring in the old Kitchen. It did really well till the pipes got a slight leak and we started noticing round uplifts in the flooring. It took 6 months for this leak to finally manifest in water in the basement. We fixed the leak and I found some matching flooring to replace the ruined with. Turns out give the engineered a bit of time and it flattens out and the circles went away. crazy stuff.
