Stair treads?!?

When you walk in the front doors of our house, you go up six stairs to get the main living area (and six down to get to the garage.) When we embarked on laying bamboo floors throughout, we decided to save the stairs for a later date. That was largely because we knew they'd be a challenge. The economical bamboo that we bought for the rest of the house ($3,000 for 1,400 square feet!) was only 3/8 inch thick, and the manufacturer didn't provide any coordinating stair pieces. (See photo to the right.)

Now that we're ready to put wood on the stairs, we have a little dilemma. The only bamboo stair treads that will fit out space cost $80 each - a grand total of $1,200 with shipping, which is nearly half of what we spent on the rest of the house! That means we're likely going to need to go with some other type of wood for the stair treads - which could cost as little as $300 depending on what we pick. But how do we handle this aesthetic dilemma? My initial thought was to try to match our flooring as closely as possible, but then I found these cool pix that use totally different kinds of wood - which seems to be a great way to embrace the problem. Any thoughts?

Just when it seems it will never end...

We finally made some progress! Our contractor Sean is letting Paul borrow his battery-operated brad nailer, which has increased the speed of the bamboo-floor-laying considerably. On top of that, the kitchen cabinets are being hung, the dining room wall is down, and the bathrooms are being tiled. In short, it's finally looking like a house again.

I'm quite happy with how the tile in the guest bathtub had turned out! I gambled and picked up a box of thin white tiles to make a stripe inside the bath. I was hoping it would tie in the edge tiles (which I could only find stocked in white, and didn't want to special order.)

The next dilemma - kitchen lighting. We've decided to go with a ceiling fan (ugly, but a good move in a house with no A/C), pendants above the breakfast bar, and a light fixture above the sink. Finding them all to match in a style we like is hard work. And of course the pendants I like from Lowe's aren't sold in New York. Next stop - ebay. And tonight, test paint swatches go up in the living room and kitchen.

Kitchen taking shape

Guest bath

Bamboo on the way down

It was a slog this weekend experimenting with the best way to lay our new bamboo floors. The floors are Yanchi Ecoline strand woven bamboo from Build Direct, a flooring liquidator in Vancouver, British Columbia. I can't say enough about their products and service.

Paul and our friend Joshua (many kudos for his relentless help this weekend!) started off Saturday morning with a manual hardwood flooring nailer, which regularly split the floor boards. Not good. Since we went with the economy bamboo, the tongues are thinner than traditional wood floors, and bamboo is known to be brittle anyway. After struggling with that for half a day, they switched to pre-drilling holes in the tongues and then hand-nailing the floor down - a huge improvement on the splitting front, but an agonizingly slow process.

Sunday morning I was off to Home Depot to find a better solution. I came back with a rented pneumatic finishing nailer and a compressor. After experimenting with depth and pressure, we settled into a routine that still involved pre-drilling, but went considerably quicker. We finished the guest room, and got started on the baby's room - not as much progess as we would have liked in a weekend, but hopefully our new system pays off.

The miraculous nail gun

Flooring installed