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