A Closer Look at Bamboo & Palm

My house has been below 30% RH for over a week now. A couple gaps have opened in my hickory floor, but nothing in the oak floors.

My last post about a floor installed over a slab and this one will set the stage for some upcoming bits about inspections.

A year or so ago, I mentioned seeing palm floors in Fiji. My buddy, Genia, mentioned a palm floor that she looked at more recently in a forum post. Palm is one of those kinds of groups like oak or pine where there are lots of different species in the group. In palms, we have coconut palms (where coconuts come from), and date palms (where dates come from). The SC tree is the palmetto palm. The floor I looked at recently was a grit palm (where grits come from.) If you're not from the South, you may not be familiar with grits. But shrimp and grits are tasty, as are grits with butter or syrup.

Palm wood looks a lot like bamboo, but is big enough that it doesn't need to be glued together to be big enough to use as flooring. Here are photos of the end grain of a piece of bamboo…

… and palm. The pictures are about 10x magnification. Both don't really have growth rings or grain that you would find in typical woods.

The next thing we see will probably be banana wood flooring.