I simply love bamboo -- it seems that my entire home is filled with it.  Why do I love bamboo products so much?  I guess it's because bamboo looks so very nice in just about any environment -- and it's also true that items made from bamboo will be very durable.  That means that purchasing things made from bamboo will prove to be a good value, sometimes long outlasting similar products made from other materials.  

A case in point would be bamboo flooring.  While bamboo flooring installation can be a bit tricky, and some flooring people don't know too much about this type of product, yet when properly installed bamboo flooring has been known to outlast traditional hardwood floors -- sometimes by many years.

Because bamboo is a natural product which is grown in the wild, bamboo makes an excellent material for items that will be used outdoors.  A good example of this would be bamboo water fountains.  There are many different types of outdoor bamboo fountains being manufactured today -- some large, some small.  Why are they so popular?  Because they help to create a peaceful and serene environment.  And yet bamboo water fountains are so beautiful many models can be used indoors as well as outdoors.  As a matter of fact some outdoor bamboo fountains can be used as an bamboo indoor fountain without any change or modification to the hardware, etc.

Another place you will find bamboo used outdoors is in bamboo wind chimes.  These have been made in Asian cultures for many centuries -- again, bamboo wind chimes can be found outside the home as well as inside.

Let's head over to the kitchen -- the kitchen?  Yes, the kitchen.  In my home we have lots of bamboo in the kitchen, and I'm not talking about chopsticks.  But we do have several sets of bamboo steamers that we use for steaming vegetables, meat, reheating rice and dumplings.  Using a bamboo steamer is an inexpensive way to cook healthy.

If you look at the windows in my house you'll find plenty of bamboo there as well.  For example in our living room, we have installed bamboo vertical blinds.  They work flawlessly and were very easy to install (we did the job ourselves).  We also have a set of bamboo vertical blinds in our master bedroom as well.  In our children's bedrooms we have installed bamboo window shades -- they have a very simple construction, with no complicated mechanisms for the children to break.

Speaking of our living room, we also have some bamboo near her couch.  On either end of the couch we have an end table -- and in front of our couch we have a coffee table.  Guess what those items are made of?  You guessed it -- bamboo.  I especially liked are bamboo coffee table because it was constructed with a second tier -- a small shelf underneath the table top which is great for storing magazines and our TV remote control.

So you can see that I really DO love bamboo.  Personally, I just don't know what I would do without this versatile, yet beautiful-looking material.  I do know that our home would look -- and function -- very differently without it...