The Wood Floor Match Game

Well we decided to bite the bullet and order wood floors for our house. We have the cheapest carpet you can buy (seriously) and the cheapest vinyl in the kitchen and bathrooms. The carpet has absolutely no stain resistant anything to it, so that means when the dogs or Jack have accidents or the cat pukes bright pink something or other, the stain stays there no matter what. Let me say that again, the stain stays NO. MATTER. WHAT. I have used my steam cleaner with no results, and I have used about 3 different carpet cleaners. Nothing works. We have lovely yellow and pink stains everywhere. Not to mention the carpet is so thin, it is starting to wear thin already (after 8 months) in the high traffic places.

So after months of drooling over the possibility of actually ripping up the awful carpet and putting wood floors down in the kitchen, family room, den, dining room, and hallway (basically everything but bedrooms and bathrooms), we decided to go for it. Yes, we are spending Jack's college education just to satisfy my lust for wood floors.

After checking out Home Depot and Lowes and figuring out they are way higher than a lot of people, we decided to go with a local store. We searched their sample inventory and ruled out everything higher than $6.00/sq ft since we have 1100 sq ft to cover. Yeah you do the math. I should start advertising my kidney on ebay I am thinking. We pick out something that we like and we tell them to order that for us. And here comes the frustrating part. When it came in, the color was completely off from the sample. So off, that I thought for sure they made a mistake. We want a Brazillian Cherry color and what they sent was puke orange wood floor. Ugly. So the owner, who is frustrated as well, guided us to another sample that was very similiar and same price. We said sure, we'll take that one. I went this morning to look at what came in for THAT sample and I am truly wondering about the whole flooring industry. This time, what came in was a dark grayish antique barn looking wood floor. I am sure some people like that, but that is not what I ordered!!!

Now it is looking like we are going to have to up our price a bit and go for hopefully our third order. What is up with these people? Is it just because we are ordering fairly cheap stuff as far as hardwood floor goes? Or does everybody have this kind of problem? I was so excited about getting my new floors this week and being able to teach Jack how to slide over them this weekend. Waahhh. Now, I get to wait and see and hopefully win the wood floor match game this time.