SJ and I toiled many, many hours over what to use for the flooring in our kitchen and bathroom. We always like the idea of using travertine, as we'd seen this in an open house and marveled at its elegance. We soon came to learn the dark side of owning such a floor. Travertine is natural stone, which means it's porous. What manufacturers do is cut slabs of travertine into tiles fit for flooring, then fill up the pores with concrete. Travertine needs to be sealed every couple months with a sealant for damage protection. Also, no two travertine tiles are alike. You can get 10 in a box and each and every one of the tiles will look completely different despite being a similar shade. Despite this, we decided on travertine all the way for both the kitchen and bathroom.
Here is an example of travertine floor. Notice the clean, elegant look:
The rest of our house has wooden flooring, which we don't plan to replace. While it's in dire need of a refinishing job, you can tell it was put in with great care and will look fabulous once it's given some TLC. That said, if I could choose wooden floors for our house, I'd go bamboo. I'm not sure what it is about bamboo that moves me so. Perhaps because of its significance in Asian culture, or just because it's unique and trendy nowadays. Whatever it is, I love it and I hope to have bamboo in our house someday.
I'll post a close-up of bamboo so you can see what it looks like. Nice, isn't it?
So far, we've only had the kitchen floor installed and it isn't too impressive since the rest of the kitchen is empty. But I'll post some pictures of the kitchen floor soon.
