Well, I'd personally go with the real thing for resale value and the authentic feel of wood floors (well, grass floors in this case) underfoot. Laminate feels... cold and fake to walk on barefoot, IMO, and it sounds off under boots/heels too. Oh, and real bamboo floors are eco-friendly, since bamboo grows to maturity in a few years, making it an easily renewable resource. Laminate is made using wood (under the surface of the picture), and trees take a lot longer to grow back. Also, I've had no trouble scratching the laminate floors that came with my condo. :P I don't really buy that it's more durable than wood/bamboo. You can refinish bamboo down the road if dings and scratches matter to you (though really it just gives a hardwood/bamboo floor some character, IMO). You don't get to refinish laminate. Anyway, I don't sell bamboo floors or anything, just giving you my opinion. :) I doubt you'll regret installing bamboo down the road, but you may have regrets about laminate. Here is a link that might be useful: care and maintenance for bamboo floors

Wow - thanks for all the responses and suggestions! Dilly Dally - thanks for the green suggestion. I didn't realize bamboo shades came in green! There is actually no green in the counters - they are black w/specks of gray. The apple is the only green thing in the space and I tire of it every once in a while and put it away...LOL. I'm not much of a green person. Andreadeg - I'm not sure what material the floors are made of. They are wide planked and the pegs are real (I know this cause every once in a while, one pops out! The floors also run throughout our attached family room. We had them refinished and polyurethaned years ago and they've really held up well. Rjinga - There are 3 shadow boxes, smallest on top descending to largest on bottom. The top one doesn't show. The top one in this pic is a stamped metal candle holder and the bottom one is a white vase with a pink leaf design outlined in black. I'm dying to what do you think it looks like?...LOL Jimoba - Thanks for the recommendation on possible display items. This is only half the kitchen. I seem to have my "displays" mostly on the other side...LOL I hesitate to do brown because there is so much wood everywhere already. My style is contemporary so I've been trying to convert the house into that despite all the dark wood throughout! I've found a mixed brown and black shade I love that's between $200-300 depending on what upgrades I choose (stingless, edged, etc.). I have about decided to splurge and just go for it. Of course, I had hoped to be able to go with store bought for under $50.00 but that's not to be anyway because of the custom size of the window.

We put down click-lock strand-woven bamboo by HomeLegend throughout our whole house, including the kitchen. No one told us not to run it under the cabs, so we did. So far (it's only been about 5 months) we haven't had a problem with that. One thing you might want to look into is the click-lock mechanism. Our floor creaked and cracked quite loudly for the first few months. We were freaking out and calling the vendor and the manufacturer. They came to look at it, said there wasn't a problem with the product or the installation or the underlayment (we used QuietWalk). They told us that, basically, the wood in the click-lock isn't perfectly smooth (it's unfinished) and so there are burrs that need to wear out. Most of the very loud cracking and creaking is gone. However, the floor still has a lot of "movement." I'm not quite sure how to describe it... sometimes, in certain spots, it feels like a floating floor. Not sideways movement, but up-down movement. We've been wondering if our installer didn't level the floor quite right... Anyways, our friend put down an engineered cherry with a tongue-and-groove/glue installation (where you don't glue the floor down, but just put a small bead in the tongue-and-groove), which is still floating, but it feels significantly less like a floating floor. I think if we could go back and do it again, we'd do that installation method. Although we much prefer our strand-woven bamboo which has a much thicker wear layer to his cherry which has one of the thinnest wear layers I've seen.

As millworkman states. I HATE engineered bamboo. I mean the stuff that sits on FIBRE BOARD that clicks together. There can be sooooo many issues with this type of product that I don't have time to tell you everything there is know about this. Suffice it to say, bamboo NEEDS interior STABILITY. That means the HUMIDITY must be kept CONSTANT! I mean within a 10% range (40%-50% is a "10%" range). First things first: check your HVAC system. Do you ALREADY HAVE the humidity control? That means you touch a button and adjust the humidity up or down and then press "Set" on the touch-pad controller mounted on your wall. If you DO NOT have this feature, you will need to do one of two things: #1. Find something else (no bamboo, no hardwood, etc) #2. Purchase and install the additional hardware needed to be able to control the internal environment ($6K should do it). Your location and and local external environment (West Coast, East Coast, Deep South, High desert, etc) will determine the TYPE of extra hardware needed. Once you decide to do all that is necessary to add bamboo, you will then look for SOMEWHERE ELSE to purchase your products. Lumber Liquidators is NOT the place to shop if you want quality - of any sort. It is where you go when WANT new flooring every 5-7 years ('cause it only lasts that long). Bamboo *SHOULD cost $9/sf for "mid-grade" product. The "good stuff" starts at $12/sf. And you would purchase such products from places like Calibamboo or a high-end hardwood flooring shop run by a Ma&Pa operation that has been in business for at least 25 years. They will have seen the bamboo trend "come and go and then die". They would have seen many failures and many successes. They will ONLY carry the 'successes'. That's how you find bamboo. But please check your HVAC system to find out what needs to be added for bamboo and hardwood. Good luck. Keep us posted.