I vote for the laminate flooring also. That’s prolly what we are going to put in our living room. It is currently on sale at our local Home Depots for $2.98/sq ft. Hard to beat that!
Plus, laminate flooring is practically indestructible. It won’t stain-you can spill anything on it and just wipe up. You can even drop a burning match on it and it won’t burn (or so we have been told). The best part is that you just sweep up and do a damp mop once a week and it looks great forever. Unlike real hardwood, which has to be sanded and refinished every 4 years or so.
Have to disagree with you Sunshine on the hardwood flooring. A lot of prefinished hardwood has a 25 to 30 year warrenty on the finish. They can put a better, harder finish on under factory conditions than can ever put on once the flooring is installed. At least that’s what I’ve been told. I hope it’s true, because I just put in over 500 square feet of natural maple flooring in my home.
I’m leaning more and more toward laminate. I can buy a box every couple of weeks (damn the lack of credit cards around here, anyway!) or once a month as I can afford it, and it sounds like the boys and I can handle putting it in. I’m thinking the non-glue kind would be good, provided it is as durable as the other type.
I’m gonna do a Trading Spaces number on my living room, except cheaper. The floor will be in the works, while I scavenge for paint and other goodies. And a COUCH. Oh, how I hate this couch. (hmm…I’m thinking another thread is in order. I really need to get a life, don’t I?)
I will have to post pictures when the big flooring day arrives!
That’s good to hear, Shark–maybe the sales guy just told us it needs a refinish that often to steer us toward something else. Although…now that I think about it, I think he was talking about unfinished planks that are finished after you put them in. So the pre-finished kind wouldn’t need that.
we had a talk and samples of bamboo flooring in work recently. very, very, nifty stuff. cork is good and not very expensive, also a bit gentle on youngones. good for rolling about.
The subfloor is…plywood of some kind, I think. 1/2 or 3/4 inch. It’s solid and in decent shape in this room, although in some of the other rooms it will have to be replaced. It’s painted with deck paint right now, which worked fine for the last three years, but it’s time to grow up and have a real floor now.
I’ve read about cork, but I don’t think I’ve actually seen it anywhere. I’ve done most of my research at the local Home Depot, though, and I’m sure that they don’t carry everything. (Although it seems that way when I’m confronted by it all.)
bodypoet - you might look at Costco, if they have them in your area. The stuff I bought there was a good bit less expensive than Pergo. And the glue type is less expensive than the non-glue. It’s not hard to do the gluing.
So I looked at Lowe’s last night, and picked out a lovely pattern…Farmhouse Oak or something like that. It has a nice wide-plank, distressed look.
Then I started calculating:
22 boxes @ $65ish per box…:eek:!!
I’m going to check at the nearest Costco, but it’s about 2 hours away, it looks like. I’ll give them a call and see what’s what.
Lowe’s did have another brand…Mohawk? But they didn’t have any pricing available; apparently the stuff was dropped off without any literature. It’s the kind you have to glue, though, and I don’t know if I want to have to do that. Fast and simple are important factors here.
Next week, I’m buying the first box! It should only take…oh, 10 months or so. Heh.
~k
