On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:45:21 -0800 (PST), Chris Shearer Cooper
wrote:

I live in Colorado, and a few years ago had a bamboo floor installed
in my kitchen and living room, and have been very disappointed.
Despite the whole-house humidifier attached to the forced air heating
system, the "planks" (is that the right word?) contract in the winter,
and then kitchen debris finds its way into the cracks, and we end up
with ugly black lines where the planks touch.

So now we're wanting to replace the 20-year-old carpet in the upstairs
with some kind of wood floor, and are not sure which way to go.

The other complication, is that we need to live in these rooms while
we're putting in new floors - we'll move all the furniture out of the
unused bedroom, redo its floor, move my daughter into that bedroom,
redo her floor, etc. so we whatever we use, it needs to be
prefinished.

There are some nice-looking engineered wood products, but we're
concerned about the odors ... the off-gassing from a lot of those
kinds of products gives us headaches, which pushes us towards solid
wood, but then with solid wood you can't install a floating floor, so
I'm worried we would get the gap problem again. And then again, I'm
wondering if it's maybe the offgassing from the prefinish that gives
us the headache, in which case for the headache it wouldn't matter if
we chose solid vs. engineered vs. laminate.

Was the guy at Home Depot right, that the more traditional woods (oak,
for example) do better in the dry climate of Colorado?

Thanks,
Chris

A solid wood floor is gonna expand and contract unless you can
effectively keep the humidity at the same level all year round.
Composites will do the same, but less. That's the nature of wood.
For bath/kitchen vinyl is the practical choice.