Bamboo hard wood floors

When it comes to hardwood flooring, bamboo has become a popular option. A renewable resource that grows at exponential levels and has minimal affect on the environment. It’s a very popular hardwood flooring option because it can be stained or painted any color. You can make it look like traditional hardwood floors, or use the bamboo to highlight a unique appearance. Bamboo adds an innovative style to the possibilities of hardwood flooring.

Bamboo furniture or Wall Covers

Bamboo also makes for an affordable furniture material, perfect for kitchen tables, chairs, and bar stools. In addition, it can be used as a wall covering to compliment your furniture. Since it grows so prolifically, it’s cheap to use, and has the great qualities of hard wood. Bamboo is functionally strong, so you know your investment will be around for a long time to come.

Recycled Wall Paper

This is a hot trend in interior design, although you might want to avoid recycling the bright 70s yellow Brady Bunch wallpapers you remember from your childhood. Many companies take existing pieces of wallpaper and recycle them to make fresh new designs. Scraps of existing paper or broken paper are then added to make material that’s completely new. This saves wallpaper from ending up in a landfill and polluting the environment further.

Make Use of Distressed Wood

Distressed wood can come from broken furniture, torn down houses and even old sail boats. It’s much cheaper than new wood, but can still be reused to make quality products. The pieces are left as is, but can be sanded and stained to look new. It’s great for making wooden tables, pieces of decoration, or even a cheaper option for installing hardwood flooring.

Windshield Carpet Backing

Although you wouldn’t expect that you could make carpet from used windshields, they make excellent carpet backing. Tandus recently released Ethos, a modular carpet backing that uses waste from the manufacturers of windshields and safety glass to create a thermoplastic polymer. The non-chlorinated thermoplastic can be recycled repeatedly to divert it from landfills forever. How’s that for carpet excitement?

Redesign old drawers into furniture

Take a chest of drawers and build them into a new frame to create a charming but eco friendly new piece of furniture. This approach is retro and modern at the same time. Professional touches can range in the thousands of dollars, but find an innovative carpenter and you can probably work out a deal.

Wine Glass Furniture and Other Decorations

Some recycling companies refuse to recycle the green glass from which wine bottles are made of, leaving you with a nice collection if you save them from the landfill. These wine bottles can be cut and sanded into charming drinking glasses, lampshades, and candlestick holders. For a simpler approach, plant your wine bottles in the ground spout side down to create charming flower garden borders.

So, what is parquet? Simply put, parquet is the art of wooden inlays. Parquet is typically very intricate and very elegant, requiring many hours to plan and carve. In the early days, each different parquet piece was hand-carved and assembled to ensure that it would match perfectly. Because the parquet is made entirely from wood there can be no irregularities in fit as there could be in stone floors: if two pieces of parquet are not perfectly sized they will have to be re-made.

Wide Plank Flooring And Parquet

In modern use, entire floors are rarely done in parquet. It is far more common to find parquet flooring used as an accent piece, such as a medallion set in the middle of a room and surrounded by wide plank flooring. The elegant, rich tones of the flooring provide a canvas for the parquet, allowing it to stand out and make a beautiful impression. Parquet often coordinates with any wooden furniture in the room, either contrasting with it or highlighting it to really make it pop.

Reclaimed Wood Floors: The Final Touch

Although parquet wood flooring looks beautiful with any type of wooden floor, many homeowners like to pair it with beautiful and ecologically sensitive reclaimed wood floors. These floors recycle wood from old homes and reuse it, saving trees to protect the environment while providing a lovely classic feel for your home. Parquet inlays fit right in with the rich colors of reclaimed wood and are an excellent finishing touch to any room.

Explore:

• Travertine Stone Tile
• Marble Tile Flooring

Even better, the only thing wooden in a wood laminate floor is the name. The actual laminate boards, because of the laminate technology’s use of images, are made with much less wood than a typical wooden board of the same size. Likewise, laminate saves stone. Most people don’t think about the impact of quarries, but the process of digging for stones to be used on stone floors damages the environment almost as much as deforestation.

Saving Trees With A Wood Laminate Floor

In addition to reclaimed wood flooring, Coles Fine Flooring offers an excellent selection of laminate. With its wide range of color and pattern choices, laminate is an excellent choice for any home. For the green home, a wood laminate floor provides the natural look of wood without the damage to the forest. Laminate is made using an image of the desired flooring which is separated into individual planks and then highly finished and pressurized. This process gives each plank tremendous durability while making the image appear pressed into the plank and completely natural. It also makes the laminate system versatile, as almost any image can be applied.

Even better, the only thing wooden in a wood laminate floor is the name. The actual laminate boards, because of the laminate technology’s use of images, are made with much less wood than a typical wooden board of the same size. Likewise, laminate saves stone. Most people don’t think about the impact of quarries, but the process of digging for stones to be used on stone floors damages the environment almost as much as deforestation.

Explore:

• Mohawk Flooring
• Armstrong Laminate Flooring
• Contemporary Area Rugs

Whether you choose reclaimed wood or laminate, thinking about the environment is just the right thing to do. And with Coles Fine Flooring, you don’t have to sacrifice selection to save the planet: we can help you find what you need while never losing sight of what the earth needs.

Alternative Flooring Basics

It should hardly come as a surprise to hear that there are floors available beyond wood and stone. From sustainable new-material surfaces to bamboo, cork, reclaimed wood & porcelain tile flooring, the new styles offer all the durability and strength you could want while being environmentally responsible and wallet friendly. Cork flooring has recently become popular due to its unique look and sustainable manufacturing. Cork is an extremely durable material, made from the bark of the cork oak tree. A single cork tree is resilient and easily able to provide many floors from its bark.

Porcelain Tile Flooring Basics

Another recent innovation in alternative flooring is porcelain tiles. Although the word “porcelain” might make you think of fragile porcelain in plates and cups, these tiles are as durable as slate. They are fired at a high temperature, making them much stronger than ordinary ceramic tiles and as hard as granite. Many styles of porcelain tile flooring look almost identical to natural stone, but they provide much more versatility: some types are ADA slip-resistant, making them an excellent choice for a pool or other area where water can make traction difficult.

Porcelain tile is very easy to clean. It absorbs almost no water, making cleanup of spills easy and stains almost unheard of. The color of a porcelain tile is also more thoroughly distributed than in natural stone, giving the porcelain a finish and depth that even the best quality natural materials just can’t match. Porcelain tile is also an investment in your home: if you ever decide to sell, the value of your porcelain tile’s striking appearance is likely to be double or triple the price you paid to install it.

In today’s natural flooring market, handscraped wood floors are more of a luxury than a necessity. Instead of offering the required adjustments, handscraping offers such attributes as:

• A hand-done look
• Grain variation
• “Natural” appearance
• Enhanced texture
• Visual richness

Better Than Other Natural Flooring?

But how does one objectively judge what “richness” is? Is it impossible to achieve a “hand-done” look unless you use handscraping? With today’s range of natural flooring options, that hardly seems likely. Armstrong wood flooring alone offers a great variety with a much smaller price tag than handscraped flooring. Armstrong’s commitment to quality ensures that you get a fabulous product every time. They have the customer service focus that the early handscrapers must have had, the same drive to make the best product possible. But Armstrong doesn’t charge you an arm and a leg for that product.

Armstrong Wood Flooring: Selection And Quality

Armstrong has adapted the handscraping process to make beautiful, one-of-a-kind floors that won’t break the bank. Armstrong wood flooring is hand-sculpted from start to finish. It is designed to look beautiful and function flawlessly. But Armstrong also offers modern conveniences: a unique interlocking floor system that eliminates the need for staples, tape, or glue of any kind, making it perfect for the do-it-yourselfer. With Armstrong’s constantly expanding selection of woods from across the world, you are sure to find a wood you love.