The entire time since my last post (ok... and for many months before it) I've spent countless hours searching and learning about wood flooring. The installation and preparation process isn't that hard to understand. But actually finding the right flooring, that's the hard part!
One resource I've used heavily is http://www.ifloor.com - their prices aren't the best around but they are one of the few sites out there who understand that for something tangible like wood flooring that they're asking you to spend thousands of dollars on, having a way to get samples to hold and look at in person is important! We're looking for a wood that varies between chocolate and blonde. In other words, no red / orange color. So that means we're basically looking for American Walnut (the Brazilian kind has too much green). Anyway we ordered a couple of samples, which came back in just a few days and were a bit disappointed. The Kahrs flooring which looked so great and varied online was a bit on the uniform side when you hold a 6x4in sample in your hand.
So this morning we went to Lumber Liquidators to see a large selection of flooring in person. The Bellawood 3/4in thick solid walnut looked great in the 6x6 foot square they installed in the store and comes with a 50 year warranty. So we're close to a decision but in the back of my mind I'm thinking "solid wood can't be installed on a concrete subfloor... can it?" After 2 minutes of research on their website after coming home I find out that it can only be installed on a wood subfloor (in other words, we would have an inch between every room downstairs and the places I am replacing the flooring), and that glue-down installations void the warranty. That's not an option, but all is not lost...
When I put today's samples next to the other one that looked a bit plain Elle and I noticed that they look completely identical. I pop back on the Kahrs site and the picture of the room they had looks exactly the same as the one I took of the nice-looking 6x6 foot section in the store that we liked!
Looks like I'll be ordering about 640 square feet of Kahrs Walnut Montreal / 3-strip flooring within the next few days! I'm glad the search is over!
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