They may have been doing this for awhile, but we just noticed in the last few months that Costco actually sells home materials -- flooring, lights, tiles, you name it. As with all Costco products, they have a limited selection but what they do have ain't half bad. In fact, we decided to purchase bamboo flooring from Costco to put in one room of our house.
The magnificent bamboo plant in its natural form. Yes, it can do more than decorate your office.
Bamboo is gaining more popularity than ever and being deemed as somewhat of a miracle plant for its environmentally-friendly qualities and durability in homeware. If you haven't already been fed all this info before, here's an outline of the key benefits of bamboo (courtesy of Core77.com):
- Green: It's the fastest-growing plant you can use to reforest an area, and it produces 35% more oxygen than an equally-sized batch of trees.
- Sustainable: Unlike trees which need to be cut down, bamboo can be harvested without damaging the original plant, and it then regenerates in three to five years. None of this waiting-around-for-30-years for your reforestation project to kick in.
- Strong: Harder than maple but lighter than oak, the tensile strength of bamboo is comparable to steel.
- Plentiful: A stand of bamboo can generate around 200 poles in five years--the same length of time it takes one tree to grow big enough to cut down.
- Profitable: Bamboo is essentially grass, and it grows way faster than trees--some varieties of bamboo can grow four feet in a day. For a lumber harvester, the yield can be 25 times what you'd get from regular ol' trees.
Costco sells bamboo flooring Golden Arowana by Wellmade, for about $2.00/sq ft. Each box comes with about 24 sq ft, so you get a pretty sweet deal by going with Costco. The quality seems good to us (at least it met Sze-jun's expectations, which means it's good). One caveat about purchasing this flooring from Costco is to MAKE SURE THE COLOR IS CONSISTENT WITH ALL THE BOXES YOU PURCHASE. We ran into a problem of having to get another box of bamboo flooring, only to find that we couldn't find the exact same matching color at any Costco we went to. The item number was the same, but somehow the 4-5 boxes we purchased were slightly more red than everything else. As a result, the last few inches of our floor is another shade of bamboo (slightly lighter). Hopefully people won't notice.
I'm particularly excited that we have bamboo flooring in our house, even if it's just in one room. Funny enough, I wasn't into bamboo for its green qualities; I was just intrigued by having bamboo because it was different from the standard oak/maple/etc. Plus, it looks cool. I'll have to post some pictures of our new floor soon.
My love of bamboo isn't just limited to floors. We put a number of made-from-bamboo items on our wedding registries. Some examples:
- Flair Bamboo Bowls
- 3-in-1 Bamboo Board and Serving Set
- Bamboo Salad Servers
- Bamboo Tea Bag Box (probably the item I was the most excited about getting)
- Bamboo Cutting Board
Props to Crate & Barrel for having so many bamboo products. You'll even find a slew of bamboo products at places like Target. I wonder if someday bamboo will become the new pine.
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