So Many Decisions: Kitchen Flooring

When we bought Casa Warwingle, the kitchen had a newly-laid, very basic, low-quality grey vinyl tile floor:

This makes it look nice. It wasn't nice.

We knew we wanted to lose the vinyl tile - but weren't sure what to put in its place. We knew it needed to be sustainable, so we considered wood, tile, cork, and marmoleum.

One of many many images I found on the internet for inspiration.

Having never installed flooring before, I just started googling "green flooring options" and I ended up finding Green Building Supply. I ordered a zillion samples from them, and a week later we received two big boxes, full of samples. We went through them all: cork, engineered wood, marmoleum.

Nik hated most of them.

The only one he really liked was bamboo. But the bamboo came in really limited colors. (Like, two: light and dark.) At about this point I started thinking, gee, wouldn't it be great if I could go into a place and talk to someone who knows about ecologically responsible flooring? So then (literally, weeks into the process) it occurred to me to look on Yelp. And wouldn't you know it, there's a sustainable flooring store 1/2 a mile from us.

When you pay high rent in Berkeley, you get places like this in your neighborhood.

Covid had technically 'shut down' their showroom, but after a few phone calls I was able to get an appointment to go in and look. They had a LOT of flooring options.

I took home a dozen samples.

Nik hated most of those, too. But he did like one called Caribbean Cherry. (It's hidden in the back of this photo.)

Mari of Sustainable Flooring, in Berkeley.

I worked with Mari at Sustainable Flooring, asking all kinds of questions about Caribbean Cherry. To be honest, she wasn't able to tell me much about it -- so I looked it up online, where I learned a lot about tropical hardwoods. Many - like, for instance, mahogany - are endangered and NOT a sustainable choice. But Caribbean Cherry - also known as Machiche - while fairly rare, is sustainably grown and harvested by some very cool communities in Guatemala.

American hardwood options. Nik didn't like these because they have grooves between the boards.

The distributor, Tesoro Woods, couldn't guarantee for me where, exactly, the lot we were considering had been harvested -- but Mari assured me this distributor was the most eco-friendly of all her suppliers, and this wood was FSC certified. It's pretty and red, and dark, so we think it will look good next to the red oak in the rest of the house. So we went ahead and bought the last lot she had. We even got a discount!

Woohoo! Another decision made!