Abong da Apong: Looking back---the bamboo flooring

Bamboo Flooring

There are about 10 or so bamboo clusters spread throughout the property. I wanted to preserve those bamboos so I insisted that only the mature ones are to be harvested for use at the abong.

Here are two of the mature bamboo clusters on the property

The original plan for the abong was to have a small ‘balcon’ (veranda) made of bamboo flooring at the back looking over the “palisdaan” (fishpond).

The abong design was not yet finalized at this point. I did not want to waste those prepared bamboo slats and beside we have so much lumber lying around, so I decided to have a wrap-around balcon design instead. This decision created a new issue--we need more bamboos and we don’t have enough to cover the wrap-around balcon. My resourceful project manager informed me that she knows somebody in near-by Kabuwa-an willing to sell some bamboos at the right price of course. And so the basar (local term for bamboo flooring) production line keeps going.

Some interesting facts on the balcon construction. There are over one thousand 1.5" individual bamboo slats used throughout the wrap-around balcon. Each slat is secured by bamboo peg instead of nails. We burned two electric drills during the construction process. We needed a lot of bamboo pegs, so we employed three local housewives around the abong to make those bamboo pegs. I created a steel template that when a small piece of bamboo stick is hammered into its 3/8” diameter hole, a finished and uniformed “chop-stick” comes out. I offered to pay them one peso for each stick they make and they average 250 to 300 sticks per day. It only took them only four days to produce over one thousand of those chopsticks.

Using a 3/8” drill bit, we drilled a 1.5” hole on the bamboo slat then use portion of the chopstick to secure (i.e., “nail”?) the bamboo slat to the floor. The workers estimated that if we have nailed those slats, we would need over 100 kilos of 1” nails. Below are some of the pictures of the basar production.