Saturday, December 21, 2013

Flooring meeting

We met with Nicole at Rite Rug, today. Yet, again, we were thrilled with her knowledge and professionalism. With the holidays and everything else going on, a Saturday appointment worked best for us and she was so gracious, even though we were fifteen minutes late because of Christmas traffic.
As for the flooring options, we really lucked out. We started out with the first floor. We're getting laminate flooring in the kitchen, dinette, morning, and powder rooms, plus the hallway. The problem? All of the patterns are wood grain. We really prefer tile patterns. You can go "out of line" and pick different flooring, but there is no availability guarantee, which means that you risk them being out of stock and delaying the closing or having to choose a different pattern. Until a week ago, we would have had to order samples and come back another time to make the choice, but they just added residential flooring services, so they had a ton of options in the showroom! We are taking the chance and chose a stone tile option with some tan, rust, and dark grey colors, the Armstrong Roman Grey pattern. We also picked a wood grain backup option, just in case, Bruce Bronzed Jatoba. We plan to keep this flooring for the long-term, so we went with top-of-line (G) laminate. If you think of cardboard with a low-quality picture on it when you think of laminate, you really should take another look. Laminate has come a long way since it was introduced in the US twenty years ago. The high quality flooring is textured, has high-quality images, is very durable, and very affordable. We have a stone tile laminate in our current entry and kitchen and people have to do a double-take and look closely before confirming that it is not actual stone.
We're getting carpet in the family, living/study, and dining rooms. We upgraded the carpet to second tier (B) because it is stain-treated through the whole pile; the bottom tier is only topically treated. The second tier is also 3.25 rated out of 4 for wear, as opposed to 2.5. Even though we plan on replacing the carpet within a few years, with three kids and a dog, the more durable carpet is a better choice. There are only about a dozen color choices of mostly tans. We chose a dark tan for the family room, and light medium grey for the study and dining room. My wife and I disagreed about the padding, but I went with her choice, the base 5#. We ended up choosing a steel blue-medium grey for zone 2 (the bedrooms, upstairs hallway, and steps. While there is no charge for different options in the first floor rooms, every different option in zone 2 comes with a $200 fee, on top of prices variations.
The bathroom options were the one thing that was extremely disappointing. I realized after the fact that it was because we chose level 2 tile. We get two options - white and almond. The base countertop comes in your favorite color, as long as your favorite color is white. Ugh. I said multiple times that I was not happy at all with the options, but Nicole did not once point out that there would be more options if we upgraded the option. In the end, we chose the almond tile. We think that it will look better than having white walls, with a white countertop, and white floor time, but I really do not think that it will look good.
As for the laundry room, we went for base-model rolled linoleum resilient flooring. It's ugly and cheap, but no one should ever see it, except us. We chose a stone tile pattern, which my wife is virtually certain is the same exact pattern that we chose when we temporarily needed to cover our kitchen floor in our current home. If it was good enough then, then why not, now? The thing to be aware of with the linoleum flooring is that it is glued down! It can be a huge pain to pull up. Originally, we were just going to go with linoleum throughout the house and then pull it up and replace it, ourselves, but once we remembered this, we elected just to pay for the linoleum that we want to keep. Carpet is easy to pull up, generally, but the staples that hold down the padding can be a pain. It is nothing compared to linoleum glue, however.

Pictures do not do it justice, but this is our first choice.

The linoleum for the laundry room, up against the second-floor carpet.

Our backup laminate flooring selection.

Our laminate flooring and counter top selections. Again, the colors are off on the picture.

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