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Sustainable flooring options for your new Custom home in Jacksonville Beach

Making the world a better place has never been easier.  There are many things, both great and small, that you can do to ensure that the next generation has an equally great, or greater, future.  You can recycle your bottles and cans, reduce the amount of waste you produce, and pick up any litter you drop while enjoying the beach.  Buying a new home comes with hundreds of decisions and all of them can help the environment, but the decision of your hardwood flooring is one that can make the largest impact on the world.  Hardwood floors tend to be the pinnacle of pride for most home owners as the color, feel, and texture of real hardwood floors are near impossible to replicate.  However, hardwood floors require hardwood trees which tend to take decades to grow or wood from old growth forests.  There are many options for sustainable hardwood floors to put in your custom home in Jacksonville Beach Florida and all of them have different levels of sustainability.  So, we will look at a few of them starting from the rather sustainable to the extremely sustainable.

Bamboo is quickly becoming the hot new thing in the building market.  The plant grows incredibly fast, some species can grow from a small, tender shoot to a towering plant in 90 days, and the material can be used for almost anything, including hardwood flooring alternatives.  The process of making bamboo floors does require the fiber to be compressed together and sometimes chemicals with high volatile organic chemicals, or VOC’s, are used.   Bamboo is a great, sustainable option for hardwood flooring alternatives.

Cork is not just for shoe soles and wine bottles, but also for flooring.  Cork comes from the bark of cork trees so the tree itself is not harvested.  The bark is stripped off and a new layer grows over the tree in about a decade, making cork a very sustainable option.  The production process is also sustainable as most cork manufacturers don’t use any solvents or VOCs.  There might be some issues with durability as some customers report slight dents due to heavy furniture, however there are many cork floors that are still in use from over a hundred years ago so you will just have to spend some time looking at the reviews to get the most mileage out of your cork floors.

Finally, the best alternative to hardwood floors is hardwood floors.  Reclaimed materials is quickly becoming a fantastic trend in the construction and remodeling industry.  Reclaimed materials are good, solid building materials, such as tiles or hardwood flooring that come out of older buildings.  Hardwood flooring is built to last and in many cases will outlast the building they are in.  Reclaimed hardwood floors are the most sustainable option because no new trees are cut to make the floor and the floor is hardwood, not an alternative.  There are many companies that build their entire business around reclaimed materials so finding reclaimed hardwood floors should not be a problem.

When you are sitting down with your plans for your new home in Jacksonville Beach, don’t settle for anything less than a sustainable floor.  There are many options out there and if you need any help, Glenn Layton Homes will help you choose.  Glenn Layton Homes will be able to build the home you want with any sustainable flooring option.  Make the future great with a sustainable hardwood floor.

Categorised in: Coastal Building Tips, Design Tips, Green Tips, New Home Tips, New Homes

This post was written by Glenn Layton Homes