Liberty's Blog

Bamboo All Over The Place

I do rant about Chinese trade and I do it fairly often. Today I received 105 boxes of bamboo flooring made in Communist Red China. I'm not very proud of myself for it but I guess we all have to make decicions that are best for us. Generally I do try to avoid buying Chinese, and I do resent the hypocrisy of treating China with most favored nation status, and the Cuban Embargo. My feelings on this is more about how we treat the Chinese as a goverment, than as a people. I don't feel much guilt about buying the bamboo. I just hope they don't turn the profits into another Scud missle.

Equality and I decided to put bamboo flooring here before we even bought this place. Its very nice looking, environmently friendly, and the cost should be recoverable when we eventually sell. The carpets here are old and coffee stained. The improvement should be dramatic.

This is going to be a learning experiance. We shopped for the wood for a year and attempted to learn all we can about installing it. Yesterday we got 4 pallets of it delivered right to our driveway. I recruited number 2 son to help me get this stuff in side. 105 boxes sure does fill up a living room. The costs scale up pretty fast. The installers want at least $3.00 a square foot to install this stuff. Thats about 1 Board!! So I'm attempting to do it myself. The glue to hold this stuff down is about $100 for a 4 gallon tub, This is the cheaper stuff. Some sales people were insistant that I needed $200 a bucket glue. I Maybe I can put any leftover glue into tiny bottles and I can sell it for 3-4 dollars a pop. Then there is the trim. You use "quarter rounds" to interface the wood to the wall. The problem is that the bamboo trim is pretty expencive. We will use cheap varnished pine, for the quarter rounds. T-molding, reducers and Thresholds will be bamboo, because its more visible and we don't need that much.

So far all we've done is received some of the materials. We started removing some linoleum tiles, but we really haven't done much yet, There is furniture to move, including a piano and carpet to tear out. It will be at least another week befor I lay the first stick of bamboo. In the meantime this place is gonna be a wreck.

posted by Liberty @ 5:27 AM