Weekend adventures and insights

The wealth of information available on the Internet is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it is possible to learn about nearly any topic online. On the other hand, if the topic is a subjective one (such as, hypothetically speaking, "Does bamboo make a good flooring material that holds up well to daily traffic and the antics of wild schnauzers?"), one can spend hours studying the topic, reading opinion after opinion after opinion, and come away with nothing more than a headache and an increased sense of uncertainty. And on the gripping hand, for such subjective topics, it seems to be inevitable that whatever opinion one begins the search with, 80% of the content thus encountered will tend to express the opposite opinion. (Again, just as a hypothetical example, if one begins the search believing that bamboo is in fact a good flooring material, the vast majority of search results will express that bamboo is crap that scratches if you so much as look at it sideways and will make you rue the day you ever installed it...)

This is especially problematic for me, as I have an unfortunate tendency to believe that the Internet Google can answer any question (even truly subjective ones) if only I can manage to specify the correct set of keywords. Thus it is that I have spent about 10 hours over the last three days researching the topic of flooring materials (primarily cork and bamboo, but also laminate, hardwood, etc.), resulting only in the aforementioned headache and uncertainty. 

To try and actually make some real progress on this issue, we set out on Saturday to visit some of the floor stores in the area. And by fortunate coincidence, this weekend turned out to be the annual clearance sale at Lumber Liquidators. They happened to have both cork (a pretty pattern with reddish grains) and bamboo (like this) on clearance for less than $2 per square foot. We liked the appearance and the quantity of both floors. However, since this was a clearance sale, the floors were only available until Sunday (i.e., one day after we first visited the store.)

Now, if you know me and Heather, you know that we don't like to be hurried into making decisions. You probably also know that when rushed, our most common decision is to not make a decision - that is, to simply wait until the decision is made for us by timing-related factors beyond our control. So by default, we would almost certainly choose between the two floors by not choosing at all, and end up with neither floor when the sale ended. Easy, right?

Well, if you know us, you also know that we don't like to think of ourselves as being predictable, and we both can be a bit contrary. When we realized what we would probably end up doing, we realized that simply wouldn't do. Thus, at 3:30 Sunday afternoon, we were back at Lumber Liquidators, picking out the floor that we would buy. 

So now we have 680 square feet (22 boxes) of bamboo flooring stashed in every nook and cranny of our apartment. It may be a little crowded around here for the next month and a half, but we made a decision, and now we'll have nice looking floors in our new house - or will we? Maybe I should Google that...