hi coll 3:

we put strand woven bamboo (home legend from HD)throughout our whole house, including the kitchen, about 4 months ago. we're just a couple with a very large dog, but have had no problems with the dog's nails, and he has fairly long nails (he's terrified of the clippers and it's a struggle to cut them every time). he runs around, jumps, chases the cat, we play fetch indoors, etc. and no scratches. cleaning up his drool is more of a problem. we've only had a few minor scratches from chair legs that lost their felt tabs.

i don't know much about carbonized; we didn't consider it because everyone warned us how terrible dog's nails are on wood floors, and we just went straight to the highest janka rating, which was strand woven.

we're very happy with the floor...mostly. we went with click-lock installation, and the floor is noisier than we expected: creaks and some cracks. we're told it's a matter of wearing the burrs out of the click-lock mechanism, but we're also pretty sure that some areas of the floor weren't perfectly leveled by our installers.

We've had carbonized bamboo floors for years and just installed it again in our remodel - the latest installation hasn't too much longevity to recommend it but the previous did. We had no issues at all, though it should be noted we have two girls.... Plus, I'm really not terribly picky. There were glitches here and there, mostly from installation I think. To me, floor imperfections just doen't really faze me. DH groused occasionally, but it never caused him to think twice about installing it again.

For us, the environmental as well as aesthetic benefits just make it a no-brainer. We've detected no detractions for us personally. We don't have a dog, BTW - I imagine their nails could be an issue.

p.s. I wrote this earlier but forgot to send it and see there's been a response from ladoladi, plus I've had a chance to ask dh about our floors. First, I'm not sure that "carbonized" is a parameter that includes "strand woven". I could be wrong, but I think 'carbonized' refers to the coloring of it and 'strand woven' to the technique of turning the bamboo into flooring.

Ours is carbonized (I think, though looking at our invoice now I'm not so sure -- it says "natural light strand woven"), meaning it's cooked a little and has a slight caramel coloring as a result ;). Whatever it is, I'm including the link to the internet company we bought it from below. They were wonderful to deal with; I couldn't recommend them more highly and I couldn't be happier with their product. We had a little installation issues because the first crew wasn't terribly experienced but once we got real floor guys involved they were very happy with it. They said it was very hard but fine to work with. They had to patch some problems from the first crew too and the flooring held up surprisingly well to that.

I think there are some incidental pictures of it in a recent thread entitled something like 'I'm officially excited' -- something like that.

I wasn't part of the flooring-choice process but I know dh sweated quite a bit about it. He decided after much bellyaching to go with this company. They weren't the cheapest, I don't think. But he thought it was better quality than HD's. Floors seemed sufficiently fragile to be worth investing in high quality to us (we skimp elsewhere but this was one of our up-places).

Here is a link that might be useful: Ambient bamboo flooring

Thanks for the information. I guess I need to ask the contractor about whether or not the bamboo is strand-it sounds like it can be both carbonized and strand? Or does anyone out there know the answer to this question?

Hi coll -- definitely check out the website I posted; there's a "101" section with answers to all your questions I'd venture to guess. I did know the answer to your question at one point; but I've dumped the info from my brain cells to make room for the reams of new useless info I need to hold. Even if I did, others more knowledgeable have posted books on the subject and it's easily available online. Just start, if you will, with that link in my response above - click on the underlined part that says "ambient bamboo flooring" and find the information section. That's a purveyor's website so of course they'll be biased toward their product, but there's a lot of good general info there. Then just google 'bamboo floor info' or something. I remember when I did that there were mounds of great sites (lots of long-term gain I achieved though, eh?). IME many of the startup companies that are distributing this stuff are very ideally motivated and are very eager to share (even proselytize if you like) information about the matter. Some (me included) believe this is a rather "righteous" product and they're very eager to bring you into their camp (using an easily renewable resource like grass makes a ton of sense to me. How the impregnation of all that resin affects the energy calculations I don't really know, it has to be said, but it sure *feels* good!).

This company sources their product directly from China. I imagine you can buy some (in)directly from a flooring distributor in your area or even HD. You'll have the whole brick-mortar vs online social dilemma to wrassle with next. But just fyi, our going direct with these guys (Ambient) was very, very easy and I don't regret it. Eventually I had to hire professional floor guys to install it though and they thought it was good quality, harder than their version they thought, though they said it can be a little difficult to tell that casually. My price was similar to theirs I think, again, the quality may have been a teensy bit higher.

If you'd rather just get info from the horses' mouth I'm sure you can call the company and just talk with a CS rep without committing to buying anything.