The flooring in your home is an important thing, one of the aspects of your home that will be put to use every single day. If not for your flooring, your home would not have nearly the structural integrity that it does. In fact, flooring options are essential to keep us warm and safe and comfortable in our homes. They also, of course, provide a great deal of style and individual flair to each home.
And the flooring options that are out there are certainly quite vast. In fact, from hardwood flooring to carpet to linoleum to vinyl to tile and more, it can seem nothing if not overwhelming to pick out the right type of flooring for your home. For many people – up to 46% of them – carpeting is ideal in rooms like the bedroom and the living room, as carpeting is relatively inexpensive, in comparison to other types of flooring, and can provide a great deal of coziness to a room. If you’ve ever woken up on a cold winter morning, you’ll know the difference that carpet can make over wood or tile or linoleum or vinyl flooring.
However, carpet flooring is not ideal for every room in a home, as rooms like the kitchen and bathroom are not particularly designed to support carpet flooring, just by the nature of the room itself. In such cases, hardwood flooring is likely to be preferred – and many people actually prefer hardwood flooring throughout the entirety of the home. Hardwood flooring is often of a very high quality, as well as incredibly aesthetically pleasing. Many people who are prospective home buyers have even stated that they would pay more for a home that included hardwood flooring throughout, so prized is hardwood flooring in homes here in the United States.
But hardwood flooring options are not always ideal from a cost standpoint, as well as from an environmental one. For one thing, hardwood trees can take up to 20 years to mature – if not even longer, with some types of hardwood trees needing as many as 60 years before fully reaching maturity. Currently, up to 30% of the world is covered in forests, but this number is likely to change if we continue to cut down trees at the rates that we have been. Unfortunately, this means that – unless you use reclaimed wood – hardwood flooring is unlikely to be ideal for use, at least from an environmental standpoint.
However, there are a number of alternatives to hardwood flooring that provide the same look and appeal in many ways. For one thing, you can always use reclaimed wood. With more wood being recycled than ever before, reclaimed wood can provide a viable alternative and can even be more cost effective than traditional hardwood flooring. In addition to this, bamboo flooring is also an options. Engineered bamboo flooring is ideal in a number of different ways.
For starters, the options surrounding bamboo flooring are quite impressive. For instance, a steel gray color finish is popular in such strand bamboo flooring, but a steel gray color finish is far from the only option available. However, having a steel gray color finish for your locking bamboo floors is ideal right now, as the steel gray color finish is quite on trend at this point in time. If you’re someone who is looking to sell their home in the near future and are making renovations accordingly, a steel gray color finish is likely to be a great way to entice the younger market of home buyers here in the United States.
Aside from the option to have a steel gray color finish, bamboo floors are also incredibly ecologically friendly, as bamboo will grow to maturity in as little as 3 years. And with the flooring industry bringing in more than $21 billion dollars a year, the competitive pricing of bamboo flooring is likely to be quite enticing for a wide variety of home buyers here in the United States. Installing bamboo flooring is often also quite simple, whether it has a steel gray color finish or not, instead incorporating another design element.
