“We’ll just do a simple click-lock floating bamboo,” we said. “We’ll pay a contractor, but it’s totally DIY-able,” we said.

Friends, flooring is hard. This is a process post about choosing the right flooring and installation for our home. TLDR: Skip to the end when we tell you the super-important part about bamboo installation on an uneven subfloor.

As you know if you follow GlitterUpper on Instagram, or if you have the misfortune of being on Kate’s speed dial, picking out a floor took us WAY too long. Indigo had researched early, so we knew we wanted bamboo flooring, because it’s environmentally sustainable and has good hardness ratings (super important for people with doggos like Ellie). Bamboo is basically a gigantic grass, which grows quickly and spawns from its own roots, so it can be harvested in up to 1/10 the growing time of a traditional hardwood tree. It’s also cheaper than traditional hardwoods, and we even read that bamboo requires fewer pesticides and fertilizers.

What we were unprepared for was just how many options there would be for bamboo flooring. We were stymied by the choices: engineered, solid stranded, wire-scraped, stained, etc. It was truly exhausting to try to find just the right material for us. My friend M. reminded me many times, as she often must, that we were letting this decision get the better of us, and maybe this wasn’t life or death. (Thanks again M.) When we finally did choose our flooring material, it was a mid-tone finish that neither of us felt particularly strongly about, which is the smackdown from fate that we deserve, but it also makes us smile and remember to have perspective, because as it turns out, they’re just floors, and we walk on them.

In an effort to pay it forward, here’s a bit of what we learned about bamboo flooring:

• engineered bamboo can generally be refinished at least once, though you will hear otherwise (or so we’ve read)
• solid stranded is generally considered the best for hardness and longevity / refinishing / etc.
• there are also horizontal (wider) and vertical (more narrow) solid options for bamboo, and they tend to have that traditional bamboo look with splotches (“knuckles”), especially in a natural finish

And a little bit about finishes:

• those bamboo knuckles come in various sizes — for Kate, the smaller or darker splotches made flooring look dirty, and she fears bugs, so she didn’t want anything that made her look twice to make sure it’s not a creepy-crawly
• wire scraped / wire brushed creates a nice variation in surface texture and a few dings and spots to make your floor look like more than flatness
• Bamboo can be finished in any color you like, but the light to mid-tones will be less jarring when you get scratches — because you *will* get scratches
• some natural/light-toned bamboo can look a little green in some lights, so you should know if that’s for you
• generally, you should plan for your floor to be darker than your walls to draw the eye up and make a room feel larger and brighter, but you know, live your life how you want and play with color if you have light floors

And here’s how they work:

• tongue and groove flooring is the traditional kind, each board fitting into the next, and is generally paired with a nail down installation on a wooden subfloor (this is the traditional hardwood route)
• there is also click lock, which you can use over a foam underlayment to create a DIY-friendly “floating floor” (this is the easiest installation and you should really spring for the upgrade on underlayment for additional insulation and give)
• a third installation option, glue down, holds hard like the nails, but you have to pay extra for the expensive buckets of glue (this is recommended for concrete subfloors, but can also be used over wood subfloors like nail down)

We were doing the floors on our main level before move-in, so we had planned to pay a contractor, but we were planning to have a click-lock floating floor so that we could save money and replicate the installation on other floors in the future. We scheduled a visit with a great local contractor through the installation service that partners with our flooring store. And that’s when we learned how wrong we were.

Perhaps some others of you out there have homes whose foundation settled or whose basement ceiling construction inexplicably placed load-bearing structures in locations that push up the upper flooring. Perhaps, like us, you’re fixing up your first home on two nonprofit salaries, and you are hoping you can just get by with the least expensive option. Well, here’s what we learned:

If your subfloor is uneven, you should not install a click lock bamboo floating floor.

Our contractor quickly showed us the hills, valleys, and one giant hump that make up our uneven subfloor and then showed us what we were trying to forget: bamboo is giant grass, y’all. If the pressure on your floor over the underlayment is uneven because your subfloor is uneven, one wrong step on a crack and those tiny locking connections from the click lock can split and even break right off.

There are a few ways to fix an uneven subfloor, and honestly we probably could have done something about the hump, but friends, there is hope for us all: glue down installation solved our problem entirely! Other than the hump, all of the smaller imperfections and waving hills of our subfloor are barely noticeable with the boards glued down, just like in any older house with hardwoods. And just adding screws to the subfloor took care of the squeaks beneath. Glue down installation (and a great installation contractor) really saved the day, making our flooring secure for the long haul.

And in case you’re wondering, we did ask about nail down, which is recommended for hardwoods and would have saved us almost $1,000 for about 650 square feet. Those tiny nails could have caused the same splitting as the click lock, so it was worth the investment for the glue. Because, y’all. Bamboo is GRASS.

Here’s hoping that this post gave you more context for your next project, young padawan, because it’s definitely clear to us that we all have much to learn.