Golden Select is a wonderful brand of bamboo flooring. Make sure you know how to properly care for bamboo floors. Some are not ad hard as others. I think you have made a good choice with this type of bamboo. Here's a link to all the bamboo flooring info you need... If you're buying it from costco you may end up installing it yourself (this site provides installation instructions free) There's also care and maintenance tips, the history of bamboo flooring, and tons of blogs with tips and tricks from bamboo flooring consumers. It's really helpful. I hope it helps you out! :) Here is a link that might be useful: Everything-Bamboo Flooring!

taw9370: We have also purchased Stepco brand bamboo flooring from FastFloors. I'll start by noting that they screwed up our order a bit; the salesperson incorrectly described the trim accessories available, and the 'end-cap' or 'threshold' trim was overlap style - like you would use for a floating install - rather than the integral tongue-n-groove style we wanted. The reducer on the other hand _was_ integral with the flooring, so either Stepco doesn't describe it very well, or the salesperson just didn't check hard enough. However, we have been very happy with FastFloors' customer service post-screwup. They haven't seemed to dodge our calls and respond to both phone and email queries quickly. They agreed to send out additional reducer (which our installer agrees could be modified to our needs) to replace the end-cap trim (which they told us to just keep because it wasn't worth it to them to pay to ship it back), and it fedexed out the next day. Of course, FedEx somehow managed to lose it and didn't tell anyone till they missed their scheduled delivery date :-(. Our tracking number showed it as 'on time for delivery' on the specified day until it missed then it just showed nothing. Bad FedEx >:-(. However, a quick call to FastFloors, and they're sending us another replacement, no problems at all. Due to the multiple snafus we're pushing the time envelope for getting everything together (contractor supposed to start this week), but we're pretty happy with the FastFlors service so far. As to the Stepco product itself, we're getting the carbonized/carmelized strand woven 'Dimensions' engineered floor for a glue-down install on concrete. This product is a 3-layer engineered floor where the bottom two layers are perpendicularly laid (middle layer 90 degrees from top or bottom layers) horizontal bamboo, and the top wear layer (nice & thick too) is strand woven. We hated every horizontal and vertical bamboo sample we got from any manufacturer because they all lacked the advertized "twice as hard as oak or maple!!!!!!1!one" hardness. Very soft in our stress testing - dropping keys, dropping knives, dropping pieces of brio track, turning upside down and standing on them and using as skates on our tile floors (I weigh too much, not gonna tell exactly), gouging with a nail punch.... etc :-). I wouldn't recommend horizontal or vertical grained bamboo to anyone. I highly recommend the strand woven bamboo however. That stuff is ****ing DENSE and hard as hell. Pretty good water resistance too since it's pretty much all glue - we soaked one sample half in and half out of a bucket of water for about 24 hours and couldn't tell which half was which. WAY harder than the other samples we got (including actual oak and maple samples, which were about on par with the better quality horizontal/vertical bamboo for dentability), and reasonably priced. So long story short, we found that Stepco was introducing this engineered bamboo with a strand woven top, and it sounded ideal since it combined the durability of a strand woven top with the added stability of engineered construction. Plus it was on sale (online things are always on sale one way or the other), and we got free shipping of our 1300 sq ft (saved another ~$600 there). We haven't installed yet (like I mentioned, starting this week though), but I'll be keeping my eye out for the rough edges taw9370 mentioned. We unpacked the first couple layers of one box and they looked good on the top edges (the strand woven layer), though I probably could have gotten a splinter off of one of the bottom edges (the horizontal bamboo layer) if I tried. I'm not worried too much at this point as I wouldn't expect the bottom to be as finely finished as the top bevel anyway, though it always gives me a little heart atack when someone says a product is bad after I already bought it :-). This is actually my first post, though i've been reading for a long time - I just finished a full DIY kitchen remodel including wall/ceiling/cabinet/electrical/counter/appliance removal with lots of reinforcement from the posts on this form. I plan to make a web page with pics of the process and end result when I'm done (ha ha ha ha... seriously. HA HA HA HA - we all know I'll never be completely done) and will try to remember to share. What I learned from the experience: 1) Ikea cabinets rawk! 2) Whoever thought 7' kitchen ceilings were a good idea (early 80's) should be shot. 3) Removing a (non-load-bearing) wall is easy and fun 4) Whoever invented that simple drywall jack: I love you and want to have your babies. Pfennig PS: If anyone in the Austin area is looking for a good installer, I highly reccomend floorguy. We had three contractors come out to quote our install job (I didn't want to screw that one up, and I'd get glue everywhere for sure), and we preferred floorguy over the other two by a large margin. We didn't use him because the price difference between him and the middle-price contractor was a bit over the premium we decided we'd be willing to pay for him, but we'd still highly recommend getting him to come out if you're in the area. We'll let any interested parties know if we'd also recommend the installer we _did_ go with after our install is done :-).

If anyone has Bamboo strand (by Mohawk) from Costco I would like to know if you liked it ? Thanks!

Can you put down the birch and then put rugs over it to protect it from your family? That way buyers will see the hardwoods under the rugs but large portions of the wood at least would be protected. I agree with you about not spending too much on hardwoods but if the floor is as mismatched as you say you really should to change it. The home we are purchasing was built in 1972 and needs cosmetic updates EVERYWHERE including the flooring (one room has 3 different kinds of flooring - in this one room!). I like, am good at DIY projects and have the benefit of having family and friends in the construction/design business but the house was on the market way longer than others in the neighborhood and the final PP is $40k less than the house two doors down which sold earlier this year. Why? That house had been updated.