Light Weight Flooring Options

Q: I am placing a wood floor on an old airstream trailer and an important factor in choosing the right floor is the weight because the trailers needs to as light as possible. Among the wood options: laminate, wood, bamboo, and cork, what are their weight per square foot? Any other suggestions? Your website is very nice.
Thank you,
Cris
A: Weight per sf is heavily dependent on the product itself. Generally speaking laminate, bamboo and cork will provide the lightest floors. This also depends heavily on the type of installation you intend to do. Before we get too deep into this subject, have you looked into the various options and found a few products on your list as far as top picks are concerned? If so we work a bit more in depth with these.
Follow-up: I really like bamboo the best because of the ecological aspects of it. I would be installing the floor floating on top of the plywood that is already on the trailer. I can’t add much height because the cabinets are close to the ground. Everything is tight on a trailer.
Cris
A: As long as you have about an inch or more of clearance for your cabinets you should be ok to go with a floating bamboo. If you intend to install this yourself, I would look into Springwood‘s click bamboo line. This will give you the benefits of an engineered product with the appeal of bamboo. I would heavily suggest using cork underlayment (3mm should do the trick for you here). I say this because cork will hold up better under the floor than cheaper foam underlayments and you will get a better feeling floor in the end.
If you have less than about a 1 inch gap, I would look into a glue down cork tile. Typically these tiles are around 6mm thick of pure cork. Once installed, which I would suggest having professional help, these floors are durable and comfortable while taking up very little room height wise.
You could also use a floating cork as they tend to be about 1/2″ thick which is just a tad thinner than the bamboo. Floating cork planks have a cork backing which means it is not necessary to install an underlayment (although I tend to recommend it), so you can shave off a bit of thickness by going with this option and still get the ease of a floating installation.
For Cork products, look into Westhollow or APC. Westhollow has some great floating cork and APC has a great selection of floating and glue down cork.
Weight wise, bamboo and cork are both fairly light, glue down cork being the lightest flooring choice that fits the eco-friendly side of flooring.