Floored once again with indecision

In a previous post I announced that we had finally decided what to put on the garage study floor, namely a very cheap oak laminate that I had found at Lumber Liquidators for something like 78 cents a square foot.

However, the more I looked into it, the more misgivings I had. The customer reviews on the Lumber Liquidators site were all uniformly positive, but I wasn't sure I could trust the site to post any negative reviews. The people on the do-it-yourself forum, on the other hand, were largely disapproving. On top of that, other sources I looked at said that you really need laminate to be at least 8 mm thick to avoid denting and other problems. The inexpensive laminate I was looking at was only 6 mm thick. And more than one source argued that laminate was not a good choice for kitchen areas or anywhere you're likely to have water spills. Hmmm.

So then one day I was walking by the flooring display at Home Depot and saw an ad for a product called Allure by Traffic Master. This was vinyl, but instead of being in big squares that you glue down, it's in the shape of planks like laminate flooring that have little strips that you stick together... no gluing down involved. It looked more realistic than the square vinyl fake wood floor. Best yet, it was unlike any other flooring option I had encountered so far in that it didn't require any special sublayer or floor preparation. You could just plop it right down on our wooden subfloor. That made it the least expensive option we had discovered so far.

So I went home and researched it on the internet. The Home Depot website listed nothing but rave reviews, with the flooring getting very high ratings from all customers. Again, you gotta wonder about the possibility of bias, though. But the other forums also rated it positively, with several landlords saying that they had installed tens of thousands of square feet of the product and had been very pleased with how it held up.

So I told Wagner that I had (*ahem*) changed my mind once again and wanted to get the Allure viny planking for the garage. He picked up a couple of samples pieces and laid it down in the garage. There was a bit of a roadblock when I showed it to Jonathan and the kids, and the color choice I favored (hickory) got overruled by the rest of the family. So I dragged them all to Home Depot where we decided on a light oak color instead.

At this point I thought we were all set to place the order, especially after Wagner told me that he had been able to negotiate a very attractive price on it, when Wagner came to me and said that he had been researching the product and was a bit worried about how it would hold up under changes of temperature and humidity. Apparently there have been reports of the planks separating and curling up off their little glue strips under temperature changes. Hmmm. He said he wanted to ask around a little more, as he's never used that product before and is more used to traditional vinyl stuff that you glue down solidly.



In the mean time, we're having a little debate regarding the stairs to the garage study. The carpenter has finished installing them, and they look great to us as is. But Wagner wanted us to either paint them and put down rubber treads (as the paint will wear off), or put carpet down. Jon and I don't want carpet (too hard to clean), but we also were worried that treads would be hard to clean. And to us the stairs look lovely. But when we proposed that plan to Wagner, instead of him being pleased that we were (finally) cutting expenses by not requiring the stairs to be finished, he objected "But there's different kinds of wood on the stairs! The wood doesn't all match!" We tried to assure him that the lack of feng shui truly didn't offend us, but he got that look on his face again, the look that says "these folks are making a big mistake."

So at this point, we're very much unsettled regarding the garage. Yikes.