The Choice of Flooring

When choosing flooring we had two requirements. First, we needed to be very conscious of our limited budget. Second, we REALLY didn't want to remove the old ceramic tile that was underneath the cheap laminate. This would have required a significant amount of work, more mess, and more time without our appliances. Our nephew, who is in charge of this project, is only here during the week so we didn't want to add another project to his list. We went to Lumber Liquidators with one of the cabinet doors and found several possible choices. The one we almost chose was of good quality and very similar in appearance to the first laminate we had used. I had been looking at vinyl tiles in black and grey and had wanted to create a sort of "retro" pattern but we decided that this would have required us to remove the ceramic tile. Although I thought our first choice would have been nice it just didn't seem to have that "edge" to the design that I had hoped for. Right before we headed to the counter to pay for the product our nephew's young friend brought over another sample that had originally caught our eye but that we had forgotten about. After a little debate that included an elderly stranger who was shopping for his own flooring we decided that this new choice was perfect and would add a significant "groove factor" to our retro kitchen. It's made by Kensington Manor and the color is Tanzanian Wenge. It's much thicker than the cheap laminate and the salesperson says that, although it has a 30 year warranty, we shouldn't ever need to replace it unless some environmental catastrophy should occur. It is very dark, almost black, and has grey stripes in it. We LOVE it! Check out the photos.