Hi all - thanks in advance for any advice you're able to provide!

We just finished installing a Schon Quick-Click bamboo floor (natural material, engineered construction, floating over at-grade concrete) from Lumber Liquidators. The process went fine, but we feel the variation in the material is way beyond normal...

Please take a look at the following snaps - do you think there should be this much variation? The lightness and quality variations were from box-to-box, as well as from board-to-board within the same box...








We're not sure what to do next... to start, we're going to try laying some of the scrap over the worst boards - if these look better, then maybe we'll replace the offending boards with the remaining unused pieces.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!
Dave in Rochester, NY

We ended up pulling this floor up today, a few hours after my post... We're replacing it with a Bruce click-together hardwood. Would have been nice to have the bamboo, but the variation was just too much.

Thanks,
Dave

Dave,

That was pretty normal. Whenever you have a really light colored floor, the natural vaiances are going to stand out much more when you throw some darker pieces in there.

Your floor looked pretty nice overall.

Wow, the message boards are back up and running, but still getting hacked pretty good.


I agree, that is a normal characteristic, of the floor you chose.

Looks normal to me, for that floor.

Thats prefectly normal. Thats not a lot of variation. Your only going to find perfect uniformity with a laminate.

It sounds like I am a little late on this topic. There will always be a natural variation in tone and color in pretty much any natural material. It also can depend on the manufacture. I think that your floor would have looked better if the stagger was a thought out a little more. Opening more than one box while installing helps, so there would be a lay out strategy. Then you wouldnt have had a large blot of dark and then light.

But if you were unhappy, definitly better to go with wood. Hopefully something that was FSC certified (less impact on the environment).

I think there are a lot of people that have a miss conception of variation, but I definitly feel it is the job of the sales person to educate the customer about this.

Mikey