Go here for your flooring needs. Always. Here is why...
Story-time folks, I have two floors in my house. My main floor is laminate I purchased from Carpet Colour Red Deer. My basement floor is vinyl plank and I purchased it at Home Depot. The following ended up being a science experiment of sort, as we had rented out the house for a year. The experiment goes thusly, upstairs we have renters on the brand new CC laminate, basement we have renters on the brand new HD vinyl plank. Duration of experiment is one year. Now vinyl plank is better for resistance to water damage right?
Well, apparently not. Turns out the upstairs renters had been planning an experiment of their own, entitled - HOW HIGH CAN WE KEEP THE HUMIDITY FOR HOW LONG.
Step 1. Boil stuff, every day, all day.
Step 2. Have lots of showers
Step 3. Never, EVER use the bath or range fans.
Step 4. Cover up ALL the vents with furniture. For reasons unknown to me.
Turns out, they kept the humidity very high. For very long. There was so much condensation that the ceiling was dripping in the entire house. Dripping on my brand new floor!!!
I heard about the damage, and I'm assuming I will have to replace the entire floor. I come back, I had to repaint, I had to replace wrecked swollen baseboards all over the house, but the floor itself is in great shape! Just a little bit of water damage under the fridge, where there was apparently a puddle for quite a while. Four of my metal floor vents, which were brand new, were rusted entirely through, to the point where I pick them up and they disintegrated. But the floor looks great.
I am a journeyman carpenter, and I work with a lot of flooring products. This totally blew my mind. I talked to the guys at Carpet Colour, and they told me the product I had purchased from them (which by the way, was the cheapest laminate option that they sold at the time) was high quality, made in north america, and had a good rating against water damage. They said they don't sell stuff made by manufacturers they don't trust.
Meanwhile, in the basement, the vinyl plank looks like crap. Faded and bleached out spots, it is buckled in some spots, and the seams are lifting everywhere.
Now I don't remember the exact prices I paid for both, but I would guess the Carpet Colour laminate was a bit more expensive than laminate options I could have got from Lowes or HD, but i can't remember. And that is the crux, a year down the road, you won't remember the little price difference, but a year down the road, you WILL notice the quality difference.
Lesson learned. Go to Home Depot to buy your christmas decorations and furnace filters. For your floor, go to a flooring store. Carpet Colour is great. read more
