Selecting The Floor

A mid-demo view of the meta kitchen's
eating area.

In the beginning (circa 1925,) the floor of our house was oak in most places and maple in the original kitchen. There were walls between rooms which have long since been torn down, leaving scars behind. Those were covered in 1949 with composite tile.  In 1994, when we bought this house, we made an addition to the kitchen by enclosing the back porch. We took out the old composite tile and put sheet vinyl over the whole floor; all 390 square feet of it.

Stuart on the day the countertops were installed, 1994

Our son Stuart was a year old back then. At first, his baby sitter teased me for damp mopping it every two or three evenings. She said I was in love with my floor. But it was so easy to clean! It looked so clean and shiny afterwards! Can you blame be for getting a little mop-happy? Years of high-drama, tracked-in sand box sand, street grit and serious chair-scraping lay ahead for that vinyl.

Reuse, Reduce, Recycle

Floors are like any other part of a building. The most environmentally responsible option is always keeping what you have. It may sound like tearing down a 20th century house to build an energy efficient, solar-and-wind powered house out of sustainably sourced products is a fabulously green plan. It is not. There is a tremendous amount of energy stored in that old house. Even disassembling and recycling the building materials consumes a huge amount of energy. It is almost always greener to remodel and retro-fit the old house. I'm not saying, "Never tear down an old house!" I would never judge someone harshly for doing anything so completely wonderful and exciting as building a brand new LEED certified home.  Just don't kid yourself. New houses create an unavoidable environmental debt. Old houses have long-since paid off that debt and they get a little greener every day you live in one.

Armstrong Congoleum Vinyl, 1994-2014

Pardon my Digression. Back to the Floor...

So with an old floor, you can buff or sand it if it's hardwood; strip, scrub and buff if it's tile or a composite. But some floors can't be saved. Not only had our family sucked the useful life out of our kitchen floor, the foot print of the cabinets was going to change with the remodeling, exposing areas that had never had vinyl flooring. Keeping the existing flooring was out for me.

The next greenest flooring is a recycled material such as recycled rubber or reclaimed wood. After that, probably comes linoleum. which has long been made of linseed oil, rosin, powdered cork and pigments pressed into a jute backing. While largely replaced by and confused with composite vinyl flooring since the 1940's, linoleum is still made and sold under the brand names of Marmoleum and Marmorette. All last winter, I was convinced we'd install a linoleum floor in our kitchen.

A truly fine linoleum installation.

I researched online. I visited showrooms and talked to showroom guys about the installation process and costs for linoleum. I eventually sussed-out that installers don't really want to lay tile or sheet flooring with adhesive any more. They'd much rather install a floating floor where the pieces click together. It's faster and easier for them. One show room guy was postively gleeful about how quick and simple it was. And since the consumer pays the same installation fee per square foot, I completely understand why he was gleeful: Lower labor costs and higher profits. But what's in it for me? The estimate he gave me for either a glued-down, linoleum tile floor, or a floating, linoleum click-floor was $5,000. That's a lot. It seemed like I'd do better elsewhere.

Back to the Interwebs!

Maybe now is the time to let you know about two critical factors in my flooring search.

The First Factor: Clearance

 As I mentioned some time ago, last summer I stripped and refinished all of the interior doors on the main floor of our house. One of those is a swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room.

Swinging doors are hinged with pins at the top and bottom edges. The pins fit into plates in the top of the door jamb and in the floor. That dirty metal plate around the bottom, hinged side of the door (visible in the mid-stripping photo above, right,) conceals a spring mechanism that allows the door to SWING, SWING, swing, swing and come to rest in the closed position. You can see why the door can't be cut and made shorter to accommodate a thicker floor, right? You can't cut either the top or the bottom of the door. The door above could swing into the kitchen and clear the quarter inch of underlayment and the 3/16th of the sheet vinyl on the floor with maybe another quarter inch to spare. Therefore, a thicker, click-floor wouldn't work in this room; not with the door there. And I would never sacrifice that door. Repeating those facts seemed to make no impression on the salesman who tried to sell me his click flooring products. Every time I mentioned the swinging door clearance issue he waved his hand, as if this was a mere detail his installation crew would easily solve. He could not explain how. I walked out laughing.

The only solution I could think of was to remove the original maple and oak flooring in the entire kitchen, take out the plywood under the floor in the addition and somehow make all that level. But if I were going to pay for all that, I could put down any flooring I wanted. And if I was going to pay for all that, the floor I would select was going to be very, very strong.

The Second Factor: Sledgehammers in Sneakers

If you didn't know me before this blog then you probably don't know that Stuart has autism. I wish there was a shorthand way for us to smile and nod at each other and move on to his effect on floors. Briefly: He's 21 years old now and he is, as he has always been, my beloved, funny, charming kid. Yes, he's happy and doing well Yes, we had to face the challenges of finding therapy, schooling and services for him. No, we did not get much sleep during his childhood. I've written about him and my experiences as his mother elsewhere. No, he did not "progress" in therapy as much as we hoped he would, but we have been extremely fortunate in finding good support and services for him with PACTT Learning Center. Hey, look! Here's my favorite photo of Stuart:

And here's a link to a PACTT video about the need for support and services for him and his friends.

Like a lot of people with autism, intense emotions such as frustration, disappointment and even pure excitement can overwhelm Stuart. Sometimes, despite his best efforts to control himself, he releases the emotions loudly, energetically and physically with destructive force. He's much better at controlling himself than he once was, but these outbursts of behavior are still a defining condition of his life. He used to do a lot of damage to walls, and he still can, but he tries to avoid that by jumping, with feet spread apart and knees bent, like a sumo-wrestler, bringing his feet down as hard as he can. Sledgehammers in sneakers. I need a floor that can take it.

Pardon my digression, again.

Selecting Bamboo Flooring for Resilience

Ultimately, bamboo flooring beat all the others. It's harder and more sustainably produced than traditional hardwoods such as maple and oak. Except, in my research, I found that that the issues of durability and "green-ness" of the product were complicated.. I highly recommend taking the time to do research and  paying the small cost of buying samples. These were important factors in my decision. Here's some of what I learned:

1.  Most bamboo plank flooring sold in the US is grown and manufactured in China where forests have been cut down to grow our bamboo.
2.  Most bamboo from China has formaldehyde added in the manufacturing process. .
3. Types of plank bamboo in order of increasing durability: Carbonized, Horizontal Grain,Vertical Grain,  and Strand bamboo.
4. The quality of bamboo flooring varies between manufacturers. The cheap stuff is not just-as-good as the more expensive stuff. That's why buying samples is so important. 
5. Since bamboo is a grass, all bamboo flooring material is composed of bamboo held together by resins. By itself, the only really hard part of bamboo is the outside of the stalk. Stranded bamboo flooring (or "strand-woven" ) is made from separated fibers of bamboo combined with those tough resins and compressed into an extremely dense plank. It is the hardest, most resilient, bamboo flooring.

It turns out that buying a good floor is a lot like love: When it's right, you just know it. When I held Cali Bamboo's strand-woven bamboo in my hand and compared it with two comparable products, it was the obvious winner. It was heavier, denser and better-finished. The tongues and the grooves were smoother. It still took many calls and questions to Cali Bamboo's salesman, and many months for me to commit. You know how love is: Scary as hell!

Catching up in the kitchen.

Oh my. It has been a long while.

As soon as the actual construction started on May 19th, my everyday routine became a race. Not like a marathon where you do the whole thing in one day, but more like the Tour de France with daily stages to complete. But holy crap, those mountains! I couldn't keep up.

L>R: Backlog, Ongoing, Clean-up, Complete

My mistake was thinking I could do my portions of the work in the mornings before the contractor's crew arrived and in the evenings after they left. Trouble was, in between patching and painting walls at dawn or assembling cabinetry after dark, I did not slow down and rest in the middle of the day. After a month of working from 5 a.m. until 9 p.m. on weekdays, and long days on the weekends, I wiped out. I lost a week to an illness; a major body infection. You do not want the details. I had to slow down. And that's how this blog fell off my Kanban Board.

By now, the base kitchen has been functioning for a month. Although there are still ongoing projects. I'm about to install reclaimed wood shelves in the meta kitchen. And the wall colors in the dining room and adjacent bathroom are all wrong with the new kitchen; I'll have to repaint them very soon.  But I have survived, and my children and husband are still alive, so let's declare victory and catch-up on what happened, starting with the floor.