I have seen floating bamboo flooring that is hard as anything out there, I would look at lumber liquidators, I think its cheap too!
In the case of Lumber Liquidators there is a certain “
buyer beware” aspect as many of their in-house brands have been manufactured in China “on the cheap” and found to contain harmful levels of formaldehyde (with their apparent knowledge) due to their choice to use formaldehyde based glues as the buyer apparently did not want to pay the premium for more expensive formaldehyde-free glues as they were allegedly trying to substantially boost their profitability numbers ahead of a planned IPO and the cost savings were significant over the safer glues (in other words, the investigative evidence has been that it was an intentional corporate choice to use formaldehyde-based glues and market the product as formaldehyde-free or low-formaldehyde since they command higher prices while feigning public ignorance). To be clear, the resulting products were not just a little over California state and WHO safety standards (there are/were no federal limits in effect) but many times in excess of declared limits, high enough to make some customers very ill and cause chronic health issues in others. Hopefully that situation has improved markedly after the recent class action lawsuits, but who knows (?) as they apparently intentionally and knowingly marketed the formaldehyde based products as “
formaldehyde-free” so you can’t really trust on faith what they provide on the spec sheet without the buyer taking the initiative to submit samples to an independent lab for testing and verification.
Just food for thought and something to be aware of when shopping. I’m not saying “
don’t buy from them” but rather “really
do your homework and don’t trust what’s printed on the product specs or what the salesperson tells you”...kind of like used car buying! If you can open a sealed box and actually smell a strong scent of formaldehyde then it’s probably better to move on rather than lay out lots of square feet of the stuff in an enclosed space that you’ll be spending a lot of time in. But also be aware that plywood, OSB, and MDF/particleboard can also contain/be manufactured with formaldehyde based adhesives (and the latter use a lot of adhesive since they are chip/wafer products bonded by a lot of glue, plywood much less so by comparison). To review the history of this topic for oneself, simply Google “
lumber liquidators formaldehyde”.
The above is/was true concerning laminated and engineered flooring products to the best of my understanding. I would not expect it to have affected solid wood flooring products given little need for adhesives in solid wood, but then the popularity of the laminated and engineered options was their cost savings and ease of installation over solid wood options.
