So Much Wood, So Little Sanity

For the past few months, we've been checking out the wood floor collections at the nearby Lowes and Home Depot stores. We've found the quality, service, and prices all to be severely lacking. No need to shop there. So, after buying our Washer & Dryer yesterday, we went to some local flooring and house decor stores in downtown Ithaca. We found some beautiful, quality engineered hardwood floors, but they were all pretty expensive. We took some large samples back to the house and after staring at them for hours, we figured out what we liked the most. 

We've committed to trying to buy from local businesses as much as possible because it's the right thing to do. Only problem is, doing the "right thing" in this situation could cost thousands of dollars extra...

Anyway, so today we took our 2nd trip out to Lumber Liquidators in Syracuse (about an hour away). The first time we visited was months ago - right after our offer was accepted on the house. We had taken home some samples with us back then, but without a house to view them in, it's impossible to know what's what.

So this time, we brought one of our cabinet doors with us on our field trip to Syracuse, in an attempt to find floors that would compliment the oak that our house is already filled with. This resulted in our spending most of the day staring at our lone cabinet lying in repose amongst the same three wood samples......

See?

Anyway, we left there still slightly bewildered by the vastness of our options, but essentially confident that we're going to be going with a very inexpensive full hardwood option (the brazillian walnut you see in the top right corner of these pics) from Lumber Liquidators. Unfortunately, this doesn't satisfy our goal of buying from small local businesses only, but for $3.89 a square foot, how can we pass up REAL hardwood floors that are this beautiful? 

P.S. - Our flooring overload left us hungry, so at the suggestion of our awesome Lumber Liquidators salesguy, we stopped for some victuals at a famous joint only minutes away, called Dinosaur's Bar-B-Que. It was absolutely outstanding. We feasted on some of the best BBQ meats this side of the Mason-Dixon line, and we weren't alone - the place was packed to the rafters at 4pm on a Sunday! 

The walls are all carved up there, so we were encouraged to leave our mark, too.  We Were Floored in Syracuse... by the food AND the hardwood!