Floored by options

As much as I wanted to, I couldn't rest on my laurels of choosing the master bath and laundry room tile. We have several other important surfaces that needed decisions, and Wagner kept dropping little hints like "You need to start thinking about what you want on the garage study floor," and "You need to begin thinking about the bedroom floor," with the hints gradually increasing in urgency to "I really need you to decide what you're going to use for flooring." Gulp.

The problem is that there really are so many different choices, and they range in price from expensive to scarily expensive. I initially thought the garage study would be easy. Again I'm not anticipating the room will get heavy use, so I thought it best to go with something economical (= dirt cheap) and easy to maintain. If ever a space was designed for vinyl or linoleum flooring, this was it, I thought. Well, guess again. First, Wagner got that disconcerted look on his face again and said "Of course, you should get whatever you want, but if you're going to all this expense you may want to consider something that will hold up better." Then when I looked at vinyl samples at places like Home Depot and Lowe's, the staff there all kind of sniffed and said "Vinyl really isn't being used much at all these days." Not to mention that it wasn't as cheap as I had thought it would be. I was interested most in the vinyl that looked like fake hardwood or fake stone tile. These still cost anywhere between $2.00 and $4.00 per square foot. That made the 99 cent per sq. ft. tile we ordered for the laundry room look very, very attractive indeed, and I gnashed my teeth thinking we should've ordered a whole bunch more of it for the garage study. But it was a close-out with limited quantities so that wasn't an option.

Then Jonathan suggested carpet for the garage. I was less than enthusiastic about this, for several reasons. First, as expensive as tile and vinyl was, carpet was even more expensive. More important, though, was the cleaning factor. Here I must confess that we do not own a vacuum cleaner. We used to have one, but we loaned it to step-daughter Larissa when she moved to town a few years ago. We have a cleaning service come in every week to the house, and that's proven to be sufficient in terms of keeping our upstairs carpet nice and tidy. But I wasn't planning on having them clean the garage study, given the extra expense and minimal amount of use I anticipate it will receive. Even if we bought a new vacuum, I wasn't wild about the idea of lugging it back and forth to the garage. So I nixed the carpet idea.

That left us back with the fake wood vinyl flooring I saw at Home Depot, which cost $1.97 a square foot and would entail suffering the snide looks of the Home Depot employees if we ordered it. ("Hey, look, here comes that lady with absolutely no taste in interior decorating again!") So I was brooding over the options when I ran across an ad in the local newspaper placed by a firm called "Lumber Liquidators" and advertising genuine oak laminate flooring for 78 cents a square foot. This seemed too good to be true (I had seen that laminate flooring at Home Depot costing five or six times as much), but I had to check them out. Sure enough, they had two kinds of 6 mm thick oak laminate flooring for a mere 78 cents a square foot. This is the stuff that come in long planks that you just click together sort of like a jigsaw puzzle. It looks like a hardwood floor but is a lot cheaper, because it's so thin. But it looks a hell of a lot better than the fake wood vinyl. And it was cheaper. Talk about a win-win situation.



It didn't end up as cheap as I had originally dreamed, however, because it turns out that you can't just plop the planks down on the floor; you have to purchase a pad with a water barrier to go under it. When I asked the employees "Do I really need that pad or can I just plop the planks down?" they gave me that awkward look I've been getting a lot during this renovation from various stores ("Man, I can't believe this lady's lack of basic home construction knowledge") and assured me that a pad was essential to avoid moisture problems and keep the planks from popping up. They also said that failure to use a pad would void the 10-year warranty. Okay, so that convinced me. The pad they recommended cost another 50 cents a square foot, which brings the total to $1.28 a square foot for the laminate, which *still* represents a hefty savings over the fake wood vinyl while looking infinitely better. So that's what we're going to go with.

Oh, and there's also the expense of the trim. We can order a primed white quarter round for something like 45 cents a linear foot, which can be painted to match the walls. Or we could order oak quarter rounds matching the stain of the floor for a whole lot more, $22 per 7.5 foot length. The white cheapie seems okay to me, so we'll probably go with that.

Now that just leaves choosing the flooring for the garage bathroom, the entry foyer to the addition, and the master bedroom itself. Yikes.