In Search of Flooring

Busy week here at The Homestead, thus my lack of blogs this past week.  THE MOVE looms over us, and I'm anticipating it with both eagerness and dread.  A trip to Little Rock this week only cemented those feelings.  I'm eager to get moved and settled, and actually live with my husband in the same house all the time (what a novel concept), yet I dread the actual act of moving and everything that comes with it.  Best to just put your head down and grit your teeth and muck through while trying to see the bright sides.

(By the way, it's amazing how much faster spring comes to central Arkansas than the northern part of the state.  Here in the north, spring is very slowly creeping closer - trees are still very much brown.  Yet a mere three hours south, spring has jumped off the high dive, every living thing going nuts with bloom and green.  I do look forward to that.)

While waiting (and waiting) for the current family to vacate the house we're moving to on base, we've been going back and forth on whether to replace the all the worn carpets with new flooring.  Long story short, we decided to replace the carpet in it's entireity with laminate wood flooring.  I just hate carpet anyway, but considering the fact that the former family had six kids and a dog - a simple shampooing and carpet re-stretch is probably a waste of time and effort.  Laminate is durable, looks nice, is easy to install, and truthfully - putting hardwood in a doublewide seems a bit like putting a gilded golden saddle on a sow.  So, laminate it is.

Mission Impossible this past week was to find flooring at all costs.  We resolutely set out for places that sold laminate.  We started at the usual big chain home-improvement places, and as expected got the usual big chain home-improvement places service...which is to say, NONE.  Anymore you just expect it.  At Lowes we found some flooring we liked, but getting an estimate was like pulling teeth from the less-than-interested associate.  He of course couldn't tell us anything about the flooring, he'd have to ask so-and-so, and they were out for the day, and he could only give a rough estimate because they'd have to come measure and inspect and that would be a fee, of course.  Oh, and they couldn't do that for a couple weeks.  We left with our rough estimate, which was nearly equal to the entire treasury of a small country.

Even less luck found us at Home Depot, where there was no shortage of associates only willing to help us find someone from that department who knew anything.  Flooring was strung around the store haphazardly, no prices, and few descriptions, with samples on display racks that didn't work.  We didn't even bother with an estimate.

Lumber Liquidators had some nice samples, but nothing struck us as being interesting enough to wait for the lone salesman, who didn't get off the phone and only glanced in our direction in the 20 minutes we browsed the showroom.

On to Ron Pack Carpet and Flooring, which was highly recommended by a reliable source.  I can't say sing enough praises about this place based on our experience so far - from the time we walked through the door we were treated with respect and great interest.  Isn't working on commission a wonderful thing?  It can be, if you run into a good salesman - and the lady who helped us was at the top of her game.  She talked to us for nearly two hours, peppering us with questions about our lifestyle, tastes, furniture, etc, and without being overbearing or pushy.  She went into great detail showing us how the flooring was made, what made some more durable, what made some more expensive, how to install, mistakes people commonly make, and blah blah blah.  It was a refreshing flood of information.  She took note of what we gravitated to, and showed us relevant samples without trying to push us into more expensive categories.  When we came to a decision, she gave us a loose price that blew the chain stores out of the water (she then assured us she could do even better once she took measurements), and in addition set up an appointment for a no-cost inspection of the house - on her day off, and a holiday at that - along with promises to bring more samples and scour the back warehouse for discontinued flooring that might save us money by using it in rooms we wouldn't be using as often.

I'm tentatively feeling good about this whole thing, simply based on our good flooring experience.  We'll see how it pans out, but for now it seems we'll get what we want, at a price we can afford, sooner rather than later.  Then we'll be moved, situated and comfy - hopefully in enough time to enjoy a few months together before hubby deploys.  That's been the latest surprise bump in the road of our lives.  But, I'm learning to wear a helmet...like I said, put your head down, grit your teeth, and muck through while looking for the bright sides.