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Archives for September 2007

Cork flooring – beautiful and an eco-friendly choice for your home

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Are you thinking about replacing the flooring in your home? Perhaps tearing out your wall to wall carpeting and putting down a beautiful wooden floor?

That certainly seems to be the trend these days. I can even say that my own home has no carpeted floors. We tore them out when we first moved in because we both have allergies to dust mites, cats and dogs and the former home owners had had a cat. We were also lucky enough to discover that the flooring beneath the carpeting was in fairly good shape and only needed a little bit of work in order to regain it’s former beauty.

If we’d found that we had to replace the current flooring we might have chosen to go with cork. I’ve actually thought of replacing the not so nice looking laminated fake wood flooring that’s in our kitchen with cork flooring.

Have you ever thought of using cork flooring? It’s durable and comes in many different styles and colors from natural honey tones to red, green, chocolate, black and many other shades. Have a look at three different types I’ve selected to show you:

bamboo-natural_hb.jpg stone-cream_hb.jpg mediterranean.jpg

The first image is a natural bamboo style cork flooring, while the second cork flooring image is called Stone Cream (both by Valencia) and it almost looks like marble doesn’t it? The last image is called Mediterranean (by DaVinci) and it has a rich red tone to it.

You could easily purchase a style and color of Cork Flooring to suit any room in your home.

As someone who tries to live green the idea of using an easily renewable product such as cork flooring in my home is appealing.

When cork is collected for use in the creation of flooring and other products no trees are cut down. No. Instead, the bark is peeled from parts of the tree without harming the tree at all. New bark grows back within nine to ten years and is ready to be harvested once again.

See how environmentally friendly cork flooring really is? No trees are cut down or harmed at all. The fact that the trees remain in place and standing likely means that the delicate eco-systems that live in an around the trees probably have very little disruption.

Floormall.com carries several cork flooring lines made by some of the top manufactures in the business. Valencia, Da Vinci, Natural Cork, Wicanders, and APC cork floors are featured cork flooring manufacturers at the Floormall.com. I believe the majority of the cork flooring styles sold at the Floormall.com website are glue-less joint systems, which means they should be easy to install in your home.

If cork flooring sounds like it might be a great choice for your home visit the floormall.com. You can talk to a live service representative 7 days a week/ 24 hours a day if you have questions.






We chopped down most of our sunflowers

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On Monday afternoon and into the evening we finally got around to cutting down / trimming our Sunflowers as per the notice that we received from the city last week.

Last Tuesday or Wednesday we were given notice that our Sunflowers that grow in the boulevard in front of our house were causing an obstruction and had to be trimmed to three feet in height.

They weren’t obstructing anything, but I wasn’t about to find out what the fine might be for not complying with the bylaw order.

So on Monday, Chris started torturing our sunflowers by cutting down the biggest one which I’m sure was at least 14 feet tall. We had to go out for an appointment in the afternoon so we didn’t finish trimming the rest of the sunflowers – perhaps 20 in all – until we returned in the early evening.

What a shame.

Some of the sunflowers grew multiple sunflowers at various heights so there are still some flowers growing on the three foot tall stumps. Still, I don’t know if the sunflowers will survive as we cut so much off the plants that they might just die down now.

People passing by kept stopping to ask us what we were doing and when we told them what and why they couldn’t understand what the problem was. The whole neighborhood loves our sunflowers and it’s a fact that we grow them and other flowers in the boulevard to help beautify the neighborhood.

One of my site visitors had suggested, when I first posted about this city bylaw order, that we take the cut sunflowers and hang them from a window so that the birds could still use the flowers. I took that suggestion and expanded on it.

We have two flower boxes hanging outside the two windows at the front of our enclosed front porch. Since I didn’t feel well most of the summer I never did get around to planting annuals in the window boxes so they were bare all summer.

I decided to stick several of the cut flowers on their stems in the window boxes. It actually looks quite nice and the flowers are holding up well. I scattered a few of the remaining flowers in the garden bed below the window boxes and the flowers that had been almost finished or that were starting to dry into seed heads were cut off and scattered in the boulevard at the base of the sunflower plants.

I’m sure the neighborhood squirrels will scatter the dried out sunflower heads throughout the neighborhood. Did you know they nibble on the whole head? I find bitten sunflower heads in the strangest places sometimes!

The nicest cut sunflowers were set aside and when we were done cleaning up our mess I brought them inside and put them in two vases.

I figure we might as well enjoy the flowers for as long as we can.

Stupid city bylaw.

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