July 10, 2020 by Terry Holmes Carpet & Flooring

The Benefits of Bamboo Flooring

Bamboo is probably not the first word that comes to your mind when you think of installing wood floors in your home. However, bamboo flooring is a great option in many cases.

Once difficult to find in the United States, bamboo flooring has recently gained popularity as builders in America have discovered the benefits of bamboo the Japanese have known for decades. Bamboo flooring is strong, beautiful, relatively easy to install and maintain, and environmentally friendly.

A Strong and Lightweight Flooring Material

Bamboo is both strong and lightweight. This has made it a common choice to use for scaffolding in Japan. This same strength means bamboo flooring is less likely to chip than hardwood flooring. It also has a resiliency that makes it easier on joints than hardwood floors for people who have to stand on it for long periods of time. This makes bamboo flooring a great choice for an office environment. It also means if you install bamboo in a room with many heavy furniture pieces, the weight is less likely to damage the floor.

Bamboo ages well, generally staying undamaged and developing a color range over time so that it may look even better once it’s older. Bamboo is traditionally a light-colored floor, but you can find tinted bamboo if you’d rather have a darker color. Carbonized bamboo, which has been boiled, is darker colored, but it’s less durable.

Believe it or not – Bamboo is not technically wood flooring

Bamboo is actually a grass rather than a wood, which makes it easier to cut than traditional hardwood floors. In most cases, you can cut it with a hand saw rather than heavy-duty machinery. It may be possible for an experienced homeowner to install their own bamboo flooring, and the cost of professional installation is often less than similar installations for hardwood floors.

Bamboo can be installed over most other hard flooring surfaces, as long as the sub floor is clean and undamaged. However, most contractors recommend nailing bamboo flooring to the sub floor rather than doing a floating installation.

Bamboo flooring is easy to keep clean

Maintaining your bamboo floor is relatively easy too. Most of the time, a dust mop is all you’ll need to keep your floor looking beautiful. Bamboo floors do need to be refinished occasionally but generally less often than hardwood floors. You may use a damp mop on your bamboo floor when necessary, but be careful not to use too much water and to dry it afterward.

Bamboo does absorb water, as all natural materials do, so it’s probably not a good choice for a room that will get wet often, such as a bathroom. Too much water can make the bamboo warp. Be sure to wipe up any spills promptly.

Bamboo flooring is an environmentally friendly choice. Since bamboo is a grass, it grows much faster than traditional hard woods, and the bamboo used for your floor will replenish itself within about five years.

Bamboo flooring is available in a wide range of prices. Beware, though, of bamboo flooring that seems extremely low-priced. That may indicate bamboo harvested before it reached full maturity. A floor made from immature bamboo is more prone to damage.

If you’re looking for a great selection of bamboo and other hardwood flooring options from top manufacturers like Shaw, look no further than Holmes Flooring in Leeds, AL.

June 20, 2020 by Terry Holmes Carpet & Flooring

Bamboo Flooring: The 3 Most Popular Types

Bamboo flooring makes a much smarter choice to install in your home because it will continue to perform for many years without any need for sanding or refinishing. Moreover, it makes an ecologically-friendly choice and helps preserve already compromised natural resources. Bamboo is a grass that grows at an astonishing rate of 100-110 cm in a single day. The fast growth of bamboo ensures a fast production rate and discourages the deforestation of traditional timbers on a large commercial scale.

A Sustainable and renewable flooring choice

Bamboo is also famous for its sustainability and renewability as its extensive root system continues to produce new plants after the harvest. Another ecological benefit of bamboo is that it is conducive to fresh air and produces 20% more oxygen than a comparable-sized hardwood forest. Bamboo crop is denser than timbers and provides excellent protection against soil erosion, storms and floods. Moreover, it provides shelter and food for the native animals.

Bamboo flooring is a type of flooring that is manufactured from the bamboo species “Moso” or “Mao”. Once the bamboo plants are harvested, they are brought to factories where they are split into pieces. Those pieces are then boiled to remove starch and moisture. They are kiln dried and glued together under high pressure into planks. They are then varnished, sanded or stained in a variety of colors.

The Three Types of Bamboo Flooring

These are the three most common types of bamboo flooring:

Solid bamboo flooring
Engineered bamboo flooring
Strand Woven bamboo flooring

Solid Bamboo – The first type of flooring makes use of several solid strips that are adhered together to produce solid planks. Solid bamboo flooring is available in either vertical or horizontal style. In vertical bamboo flooring, the strips are not laid out flat and they lack the visible nodes or “knuckles”. Horizontal bamboo flooring, on the other hand, displays the natural nodes of the bamboo.

Engineered Bamboo flooring is manufactured with a wooden core, preferably oak, pine or plywood, with a thin delicate sheet of bamboo for the surface layer. It can easily be installed over a subfloor with the floating floor method of installation.

Strand Woven Bamboo flooring gives an attractive woven look and is made up of shredded strips of bamboo bound together under immense heat and extreme pressure. Strand Woven bamboo flooring is very strong, hard and durable. It can also be formed from strands of natural or carbonized bamboo.

Durable Bamboo Flooring

As far as the toughness and hardness of bamboo flooring is concerned, it outsmarts nearly all hardwood floorings on the market. It is 72% harder than Jarrah and nearly twice as hard as Maple. This attribute makes bamboo flooring an excellent choice to install in the high traffic areas of your home. Bamboo flooring tends to retain its finishing and great natural look in the presence of children and pets because bamboo is also a scratch-resistant material.

Bamboo flooring is not vulnerable to the attacks of termites, bugs, ants and pathogens. Moreover, you can confidently install it in your kitchen because bamboo is quite resistant to fire. It makes an easy-to-clean option as well and you can clean a spill with the help of a dry cloth or towel.

Call Holmes Flooring in Leeds, AL for a free estimate on bamboo flooring for your home or place of business.

June 15, 2020 by Terry Holmes Carpet & Flooring

Top Three Cheapest Kitchen Flooring Options for Birmingham Homeowners

If you plan on remodeling your kitchen floor this summer, but you’re on a tight budget, don’t give up hope! There are always cheap but beautiful kitchen flooring choices. Whether you are choosing new kitchen flooring for style or whether it is for a green design, these top three cheapest kitchen flooring options can help.

Vinyl can be both luxurious and affordable

Vinyl The cheapest of all kitchen flooring options, vinyl comes in a huge variety of colors and styles, as well as shapes and sizes. From basic stick-on tiles to entire sheets, vinyl kitchen flooring is one of the most common kitchen flooring options.

Vinyl flooring can easily be done DIY or installed professionally at a reasonable price. Stick-on or glued vinyl tiles can be arranged to copy a variety of real tile options. From stone to marble to checkerboard, vinyl is versatile. Best of all, it’s softer on the feet than conventional tile. That’s good news when you’re washing the dishes or cooking on the stove.

Affordable Linoleum Flooring

Linoleum Similar to vinyl but without the unfriendly environmental concerns, linoleum is made from sustainable and recycled materials. Wood flour, pine resin and linseed oils are pressed and heated into sheets or tiles in a huge variety of shapes, sizes, colors and designs. Birmingham homeowners will enjoy the ease of cleaning that vinyl provides.

While it costs a little more than vinyl, it does have all of the same features without the environmental concerns. Easily installed DIY or professionally, linoleum can duplicate a wide variety of kitchen flooring options such as wood, tile and stone.

Porcelain kitchen tiles are surprisingly affordable

Porcelain – If you’re not fooling yourself with faux wood and tile, why not spring for the real deal? Porcelain tile has all of the same features as typical kitchen flooring tile options, but without the high price. DIY or professionally installed, porcelain tiles can replicate any design, color or style that conventional flooring tile has.

Stone hues and colors are a common sight in kitchen flooring options. Easily replicated in light earthy tones to polished marble to natural stone, porcelain tiles can give you the natural stone look you desire, but without breaking the bank.

Installed just like conventional tile and stone, porcelain tiles can handle high traffic areas like a kitchen with ease. Porcelain tiles are also easily adaptable to under flooring heating solutions, making porcelain tiles the most versatile of the top three cheapest kitchen flooring options.

Contact Holmes Flooring for Affordable Floor Coverings in Birmingham

Price conscious homeowners in Birmingham love shopping at our showroom in Leeds right off I-459 near the Bass Pro Shops. (View on MapQuest)

We offer free estimates on luxury vinyl, linoleum, and porcelain kitchen flooring. Holmes Flooring has been serving the greater Birmingham area for decades and we have completed over 15,000 flooring projects over the years. Check us out around the web:

June 8, 2020 by Terry Holmes Carpet & Flooring

Working with Wood Flooring in your Alabama Home

There are basically two wood flooring options available to consumers: hardwoods and softwoods. If you choose to have hardwood flooring, you have three choices. Oak is a durable hardwood with a tight, dark grain. It is also the most popular wood flooring. The second most popular hardwood flooring is maple. It has a lighter color and has a less pronounced grain. The third type is ash. It is also popular, but not as popular as the first two. It has a uniform light texture and grain.

Among the softwoods, there are three popular choices too. The first is pine. Pine is often found in older homes. Another type is the birch. It is somewhat similar to pine, but usually has more knotholes. The third and last type is called fir. It has large patches of dark grain. If you cannot choose between the two types, there is also bamboo. A bamboo floor is more durable than most hardwoods. Or you could settle for specialty woods, if you have the budget. Specialty woods have a luxurious look about them. Popular choices include teak, cherry, and walnut.

Choose your hardwood flooring pattern

Now that you have chosen your wood type, let us move on to choosing the perfect pattern. The most common floor pattern is a straight one where the wood strips are laid parallel to each other along the length of the room. It is also the least expensive pattern. If you prefer to dress up your floor in a much nicer way, you may want to go for a diagonal pattern. A diagonal pattern makes for a nicer floor without much cost. It is done by laying the wood strips at a 45-degree angle to the walls.

Parquet and Herringbone Floor Patterns

Parquet is another popular hardwood pattern made up of individual square modules laid in crisscross fashion. The floor would look like a checkerboard.

Pictured below is an example of this style:

Similar to the parquet, herringbone also has individual square modules with wood laid out, but in a diagonal angle. Perimeter border is a design accent that can be added to any wood flooring. The patterns are added to the edges of the wood floor. This pattern works for formal rooms like the dining room or the living room.

This design is also used on the floors to separate adjacent rooms that do not have walls on them. This is done by installing a perimeter border between two adjacent rooms, giving a visual impression that the rooms are distinct from each other without interrupting the open flow. You’ve probably seen a herringbone style hardwood floor before, but you might not have known the name of the design pictured below until just now:

Choosing the right floor stain

Next on the decision list is the choice of stain colors. If you wish to go “natural,” choose the natural stain color. It is wood color in its basic form. Light is popular because it darkens the grain and adds to a subtle tone to the wood. Medium stain is also quite popular. It is darker than light, giving both the grain and wood an obvious color. Dark stain gives floors a rich feel. But, this stain usually makes a room feel dark. If you are still undecided, you might opt for a custom stain color. This design includes a natural wood floor finish with a forest green perimeter border.

Too much to choose from?

If you’re overwhelmed with all the choices, Terry Holmes Flooring in Leeds is here to help. We offer expert in-home consultation and we can bring many different wood flooring samples to your home so you can see how they look with your existing decor. Simply give us a call or fill out our contact form to schedule your appointment with our local Alabama wood flooring experts.

About Us

Terry Holmes has been operating in the Leeds and Gardendale areas for decades now. His Showroom is just minutes from I-459 and includes carpet, hardwood and tile flooring samples from manufacturers like Shaw and DreamWeaver. Click here for directions to our retail location.

May 11, 2020 by Terry Holmes Carpet & Flooring

Installing a Click Laminate Floor

Once you choose your flooring, you need to measure the room. It’s easier to measure most spaces if you have two people – one to hold each end of the measuring tape.

Measure the length and width of the room. Multiply these two numbers together to get the square footage or square metres required.

Use the square foot or square metre numbers on the packaging of your chosen flooring to decide how many boxes you need. Divide the number on the box into the total square footage or metres for your room. Do the same for the underlay rolls. When you purchase the flooring, round the number of boxes up rather than down.

Tools required

Measuring tape
Pencil
Straight edge or set square
Saw
Piece of 2 x 4 scrap lumber approximately 2 ft long
Hammer

Prep the floor

1) Remove any old carpeting, underpad or loose tiles. You may also want to remove your baseboards if there isn’t enough room for the floor to slide under them.

2) Sweep or vacuum the floor thoroughly to remove debris.

3) Hammer down or remove any staples or protruding nails.

Lay the floor

1) Lay out one length of underlay.

2) Roughly trim it to the length of the room – leave a bit extra at each end of the line. A couple of inches is fine.

Note: Laminate flooring needs to be about 1/2“ or 1 cm away from the wall on all edges to allow for expansion and contraction. Do not fit it tightly – it may buckle over time.

3) Starting at the wall edge, place the first flooring board down against the wall. The groove should face you.

4) Place the next board at the end and click the tab on that board into the groove. Continue the length of the wall, stopping to measure when you can’t put down a full board. Measure the distance to the wall and mark your board. Make sure that you measure the board from the end that clicks into the previous board. Check your measurements, and then cut your board.

5) Click the last piece of the first strip into place.

6) Use the piece that you cut off to start the next row. This ensures that the joints are staggered, resulting in a stronger floor that looks more like hardwood.

7) Insert the tab of the next row into the groove of the first row. Gently press down to “click” the floor board into place. You may need to use the scrap 2 x 4 and a hammer to get the boards to seat tightly as you move along the floor. Make sure that you place the edge of the 2 x 4 lengthwise along the boards to distribute the force evenly.

8) As you move across the floor, lay additional lengths of underlay, sealing them together with the peel and stick edges.

9) At the final edge, you may need to cut the boards lengthwise to fit. Measure carefully at each end of the gap, mark and trim them to fit. Remember, your walls may not be exactly straight.

10) Replace the baseboards if you took them off.

Once you’re done, sweep your floor to remove any dust, and stand back and admire your handiwork!

Need help completing your flooring project? If the DIY route doesn’t fit into your busy lifestyle, remember that Holmes Flooring is always available to provide free in-home estimates for your upcoming project. Just fill out our contact form to get the process started.