About 3 months ago we started looking for hardwood flooring. We knew we wanted something fairly dark but other than that we didn’t really know what else. We started looking at the usual places, Lowes, Home Depot and some local flooring companies around here. We found some that we really liked but most were pretty expensive and were just out of the budget. We then started looking online. We were pretty comfortable with the idea of ordering them online because we did that in our last house. We bought some engineered Bruce hardwoods from www.iFloor.com and were pleased with the quality, price and looks. The cool thing about them and other flooring web sites is they usually let you order samples at a pretty cheap price so that you can actually see the color and quality. We found some really nice chocolate colored Asian mahogany solid wood floors from www.builddirect.com. We decided to go with these and we are really pleased with the results. They compliment the cabinet color very well. Buying hardwood floors online saved us about $1,000 over what the same hardwoods would have cost locally. Even with a couple hundred dollars for freight, it still ended up saving us a lot.
Also, we had previously picked out tile and knew what kind of tile we wanted. We had previously picked out a color called Truvian Stone from American Florim. We chose the lava color as it had darker tones in it to match the wood. This ended up looking amazing and we really like it. This tile was a little over the budget price, but to offset that, we found some tile at Lowes on clearance that was a neutral color and looked nice. We snatched some boxes of that for less than $1 a sq. ft. and then just installed it downstairs. It still looks really good and offset the price of the truvian stone.
The carpet is one of the last things that will go in so I won’t have pictures of that until next week, but other than that, all the floors are down and we will start installing lighting and fixtures next week. Hopefully we will be in it the week of March 15th barring any unavoidable circumstances.
Also, they got the driveway poured and got some piles of top soil sitting in the yard waiting to be spread. Hopefully this week they will get that spread, the irrigation system installed and the sod and seed down so we can start getting some grass (not that I’m looking forward to mowing it or anything).
Driveway and Entryway
