question for all of you out there in blog land - has anyone had any experience with prefinished hardwood flooring from lumber liquidators? mike and i stopped by the store over last weekend to check out their flooring options and found a floor that we really liked. we are looking for a mid-tone brown oak floor, in 2 1/4" width. we are trying to stay as true as possible to the existing damaged floor and kind of match what is on the second floor of our house. we took home a sample and i actually think the finish on it might be more durable than the bruce sample we already had (i tried to scratch both with a key and thought the bruce sample was much easier to scratch). 
here is the link to the floor, it is casa de colour - lono oak finish. i can find all sorts of reviews about lumber liquidators as a company and they are mostly not good. but honestly, i don't really care about their customer service as much as i care about the quality of the product. and i can't find anything (good or bad) about the quality of the product. i will say that the person who helped us at the store was very nice and helpful, he also knew a lot about the different types of floors and the installation.
a big thing to keep in mind is the cost - we need almost 700 sq ft to do the entire first floor of the house and since we still have some other big/expensive projects left to do, we really need this one to come in as low as possible. but we also don't want to sacrifice quality just for cost, we do have two large dogs that will be running all over this floor so it needs to be durable. finding that balance is difficult sometimes.
let me know if you all have any recommendations!
2 Responses to lumber liquidators?
I have not used a lumber liquidator, so I can't help you there. We replaced the hardwood floors in our house last year though, so I had a couple of thoughts when reading your post.
1) I don't know how much you want to match the existing wood width, but if you plan to install the floors yourselves, the 2.25" boards will be a lot of work when compared to wider boards. We did 3.25" boards for our floors, and then a few months later I helped by brother-in-law install 5.5" boards ... the wider boards were soooo much faster/easier. I don't think you need to change your plans if you're set on this width, but just thought I'd mention it since we didn't consider the effort for installation when selecting our board widths.
2) Your dogs will scratch your floors; it is inevitable and not a big deal as the finish is thick enough to survive the scratching. However, the darker the tone of your finish, the more these scratches will show. We went with a dark walnut finish (i.e. very dark) and the dog scratches show quite a bit, but we're used to it now. My in-laws have light oak floors, which are much older, and you can't see the scratches at all. Just another thing to think about if you have flexibility in your plans.
vez - thank you for the comments! good point about the wider width boards, i had thought of that earlier but i just keep coming back to the narrow boards. i'm worried that the wider boards will look too modern with the rest of the house. plus the narrow boards are usually less expensive.
thanks for the tip on the darker floors showing more scratches. our floors upstairs are a lighter color and are holding up great! i've also heard that the pre-finished does a little better than the finished in place, so hopefully that combined with a light/mid color will help to hide some of the scratches.
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