I need advice on flooring. Moving to a house in queen village and want to rip out parquet floors and put in prefinished hardwood. I received an estimate around $10 a square foot from a recommended floorer. Is this way too expensive? Also, want to put a berber carpet on one floor...does home depot or Lowes do a decent job with wall to wall carpeting?
Thanks,
1

As I said in your other post, it should be less than $8/sf total. You can buy the wood at HD or Lowes for under $4 and installation is also under $4. I'm sure you can find a better price on the flooring if you try. Prefinished floors are easy to install and that price sounds high to me. Call a couple of places and ask what they charge to install a prefinished floor if you provide the flooring (you don't want them to markup the cost of material on you).

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Thanks..I guess the question is, does the cost depend on brand? The brand of flooring he was providing was "century". Also, are the contractors all reliable at Home Depot and Lowes?

Flooring is like any other commodity, it depends on the brand and it depends on the vendor. You can find the exact same brand and style with a wide range of prices across the city. There is also a wide range of types of floowing from engineered to solid wood planks.

Try Bell Flooring on 2nd in No. Libs. You can also look on-line. When we were looking at wood floors, it was cheaper for materials to buy on-line than it was from Home Depot (at least for the wood we were looking at).

Tim - Does your price include ripping out glued down parquet floors or would that be additional?

Thanks for the help...This is all very overwhelming!

Best prices and selection for HD floors I've found are at:

http://lumberliquidators.com/

and they have a store in Del. Our neighbor used them and it looks great. we aren't ready to do the floors thoughout the house yet, but when we do that's where I'm going.

we just had carpet installed by empire, and they did a great job. little expensive, but they came sat. and installed thursday. could've had it done the following monday if we wanted. plus all their installers work for them, not a sub contractor that is from who knows where like with home depot and lowes.

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http://dgoakill.zenfolio.com

They most likely wouldn't rip them out but instead put new ones over that. Seems I had 4 levels of hardwoods in my house! Do I win?

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Resident of Fishtown, Moderator of Fish/No. Libs/Kenzo forum, Real Estate Agent-Prudential Fox & Roach

HD and Lowe's sub-contract all of their installation work, so they're not even really responsible for the quality of the install.

Actually HD labor is licensed and insured and has a one year warranty (for labor) besides the warranty on the material. The selection is somwhat limited since they don't handle the super expensive stuff but just what they consider a good value. The big problem is finding an employee experinced enough to set up the measure and estimate. I have discovered the best day to shop HD if you need help is Saturday because it isn't much busier then a week day but they have loads of help.

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Forget it Jake……It’s CHINATOWN!

That's good to know! We're using a floor guy we've used in the past to install the floors we bought at Lowe's. I guess I erroneously thought that what happens at Lowes happens at HD.