Laminate Hiccup....

Over the last few weeks we had our flooring completely redone.  I like nice things but I also appreciate having a nice buffer in the bank so we opted for laminate (not to mention it would hold up to 2 adults, 2 children and 3 large dogs).  I had a friend over the other day and it was the first time he had seen the new floor, not one nice thing came out of his mouth.  It's been bugging me since but I have to remember, our subdivision is 15 years old and not the grandest of the grand around.

It's nice here and all but I don't feel like your should pour more into your house and overdo on the inside what's not on the outside.  Make sense?  If I wanted all the bells and whistles I would have bought in a sub that had all the bells and whistles, not try to polish a turd.  Hope that didn't come out the wrong way.

Anyway, so we had our carpet laid and the wonderful guys came out and knocked it out in one afternoon.  They did a beautiful job on the stairs, wrapping the bull nose.  I just love how it turned out.

The laminate, another story....I'll get to that in a sec.  For now, here's the pics of the carpet..

Now the laminate, my husband took off to help move last minute furniture and such.  He told me there was a "big" crew coming and they should have it done in two days tops.  Mind you, we had been living on grimmy, dusty subfloor with half our furniture (the other half was in the garage to allow for the installers to get started) for about a month and a half.  Home Depot was supposed to call us when the floor came in so we waited and waited and finally had to call them....only to find out our flooring was in the store the whole time.  There was 2 weeks down.  Then the BIG crew my husband said was coming out turned out to be ONE guy.  What the?!  At noon he had about 18 rows laid in the front room when he realized there was a sheen difference and it looked ridiculous.  So he cut out of there at noon while we dealt with Home Depot on the defective product.  Here's the "sheen difference"... you can see the lighter pieces in the upper right of the photo and unfortunately it wasn't the sun causing it.  

WARNING, RANT:

So after a great deal of battling, we had to pick a different flooring.  Wait for it to acclimate to our house for 3 days and then wait for an install "crew" to come out to lay it.  Home Depot wanted to charge us for all of this because "they were at a loss of product and man hours" due to this.  Not to mention they wanted us to pay the difference for the more expensive flooring, all because their product was defective.  Needless to say, we managed to work something out.....we didn't pay a dime thanks to my persistent husband.  Many thanks to Ben from the Home Depot store in Novi for providing fantastic customer service by driving his personal truck and delivering the new flooring within 24 hours of us having to pick it out so it could acclimate and be installed in a timely fashion.  That's hard to come by anymore.  Thanks Ben.  

So here's the new laminate... it has a great texture to it, like hand scraped wood.  The rest of the weekend we're working on baseboards, once we get those finished I'll be able to finish off the decorating and will get some pics up.