Now about Those Floors

One of our many adventures this past weekend included a trip to Lumber Liquidators. I particularly like how they advertise that they're not about having a snazzy storefront or expensive advertising; they would rather have lower prices. And their Charleston location definitely upholds that claim. They're located in on King Street Extension between the railroad tracks and the interstate, and their parking lot isn't even paved. In fact, when we arrived Sunday, we thought they might have been closed.

Needless to stay, their flooring prices definitely seem considerably cheaper than other places we've seen.

After hearing from friends with tile in the kitchen that it's still a pain to keep clean (especially the grout), we decided to look back into hardwood. Besides it would make the main living space look cohesive.

We brought along pictures in order to identify the type of wood: red oak (although, of course, there are several variations/qualities of red oak). Thankfully, red oak is one of the more inexpensive wood types (no Brazilian cherry for us!) and because the grain of our current wood is varied across the various planks, we wouldn't need the "select" (which means all of the grain looks consistent across the planks).

Here are a couple examples. You can see the variances.

Select:

Grade 1 (I'm thinking something like this would look nice):


Rustic:


The flooring guy mentioned that he even preferred the other types because they have more character (he also said our floors were in great shape).

At Lumber Liquidators, we would be able to buy enough unfinished red oak flooring in order to cover the kitchen and eating area. This would allow us to get the listening room floors and kitchen floors finished at the same time (and we would be able to keep get the stain matched to the rest of the floors in the house).

It looks like a great possibility, and I'm definitely excited about getting rid of our current floors (which are impossible to keep clean because of their light color and are now spattered with the occasional paint dripping).