Carpet!

The last thing to happen with the familiy room before we went on our vacation was the carpet.    Choosing our carpet turned out to be the easy part, finding a place to buy it turned out to be quite hard.   After hearing some bad stories regarding the Lowes/Home Depot contractors, we deceded to get our carpet from a dedicated flooring place.  Our quest began at the closest carpet store, Avalon Carpet, Tile, and Flooring, in Cherry Hill.   There we looked at all the carpet and quickly decided on some SmartStrand carpet from Mohawk.  Everything about this carpet seemed perfect, it felt really soft, had great wear ratings, and was supposed to be very stain resistant.  The SmartStrand fiber is made from corn, so its even more environmentally friendly.  After talking with the saleswoman we got a quote for about $2,000.

This seemed rather expensive to me, but we really liked the carpet so I wasn’t overly concerned.  I did however think that we should go to another store just to check and make sure we didn’t see anything better.  Therefore we went to Kepple’s Carpet in Marlton.  After looking around a bit we didn’t see anything we liked better, and since they had the same carpet, we asked the salesman for a quote on that too.  Well he ran the numbers and came up with about $1500.  I thought this was great, the exact same carpet, and its alot cheaper too!  We were sold, but Jess wanted to think about the color for a little while, so I told the salesman we wanted to think about it.   He seemed to take this to mean it was to expensive, and after offering to show us other options which we declined, he got rather rude and irritating.

Jess and I left with a bit of a conundrum.  We didn’t really want to deal with that salseman, but we also didn’t want to pay an extra $500 for the same thing.  We spent the next few weeks stewing about it, and trying to find another store to go to.  Turns out there really weren’t any other carpet stores in the Cherry Hill area, and the next closest place was like 20 minutes away.  Being from New Jersey I’m used to everything being around the block and I was worried the store that far away wouldn’t want to come all the way down to install the carpet.  We warily drove up to Carpet Dimensions & Flooring, where we met with Rob, who couldn’t have been nicer.  Not only that, but the quote he gave us was for $1100.  We immediately signed up, and he was even nice enough to let us take the sample board home so we could choose a color (we ended up with Cigar Shop).  He came buy a few days later to measure, and then called to schedule the installation.   The guys came by and did a great job with the install, and we quite happy with it.