Carpet for the Cure

After a month of waiting and living with the stench, our new carpet arrived last week along with some pretty pink surplus padding courtesy of our installer.  Curious of its origin, I Googled the part number on the label and discovered it was Mohawk SmartCushion (Memory foam!) and also that the color was due to a portion of proceeds going to the Susan G. Komen foundation.  All that aside, I'm still learning when and when not to do it myself but when we remodeled the master bath in our last house I made the right choice (with some persuasion of course) to pay someone to do the tile work. 

I'm not much of an engineer in the traditional sense but do have perfectionist tendencies when it comes to cut lines and grout gaps and after helping a friend lay tile in his entryway I quickly learned my skills cannot match my expectations (best way to learn something like this is definitely in someone else's house!).  We got quotes from a few installers and ended up with a wide spectrum of prices, the highest being over 2x the lowest.  In the end we landed on a guy named Alex who runs the aptly named "Alex's Flooring" and after seeing 3 professionals spend almost a week laying tile I was pretty confident in my choice to outsource this particular job.

I bring all this up just to say that shopping around and knowing where/how to find resources is key, especially when labor is involved as quotes can vary wildly and it's important to have a good way to sift through the options, whether it be recommendations from friends and co-workers or good 'ol Google.  I've also found that little old ladies on your street are a good source.  They're typically picky, frugal and have oversight skills that would make most professional project managers sit up and listen.  This is how I found my yard guy (an expense I'm currently justifying by the cancelling of our satellite tv and baseball tournaments for 7 weeks straight this summer) , who keeps our grass looking great for a mere $50/month because he already comes by every other week to do my neighbor's yard.

Anyways, back to the carpet.  We shopped the big box stores and found some decent deals but in the end saved over $700 doing a little more leg work (and waiting).  We saved almost $200 on the pad alone by purchasing it through a guy our installer know who sells job leftovers, the other $500 coming from buying the carpet from a wholesale retailer.  It took a little longer but the extra cash was well worth it, especially considering the number of things still left on our house punch list...