About 4 years ago, my wife and I promised ourselves new flooring in the kitchen when our last one moved out and we would be empty-nesters. We had originally thought about a move over to tile or stone floors. But both of those are:
- Expensive for quality or for good looks. And to find both in a single flooring choice? Even more expensive.
- Both have pretty involved installations. New subfloor, wet saws, adhesive, and grout.
- Take a lot of time to install. Well, more time than this weekend DIY flooring warrior has time for. Which means hiring an installer and that means more money.
When we really started to shop for flooring choices, we were really surprised to find new water-resistant hardwoods at American Carpet Wholesalers. We had always thought that “water resistant” and hardwood never went together. Their flooring pros explained that Shaw Floors has a new line of floors called Repel, you can find more here.
Shaw says it’s, “a collection that has been specially designed to take laminate to the next level in water-resistance technology.” With all the spills that can happen in a kitchen it sounded like a Shaw Repel kitchen remodel was going to be the right choice.
It was just that. This is the real deal in water-resistant flooring. Shaw Repel has given us the look we really wanted and the installation was so much easier than stone or tile. Repel is what they call a floating floor and that means that I was able to put it over the subfloor when the vinyl flooring came up. And all with no adhesive. No mess, no smell – all I did was start to put the floor down, make a few simple straight cuts, join the planks with the LocNPlace feature and the install was easy. Shaw Repel has given us plenty of time to clean spills and also offers the added scratch, stain, and fade-resistance benefits of laminate flooring. Moving in the refrigerator, the oven, and new kitchen island we were really able to test the scratch resistance out, the flooring held up great!
You can find Shaw Repel flooring at American Carpet Wholesalers. There were several different collections with different styles in them to choose from. We chose to use one from the Kings Cove collection called Broad Sun This one fit the reclaimed wood floor look that is pretty popular.
American Carpet Wholesalers has the entire line of Shaw Repel in both its online store and at the store in Dalton, Georgia. If you need to call American Carpet Wholesalers the phone number is 1-800-548-2706. We live in Chattanooga, TN just up the road from their showroom so we made our choice there. But if we had wanted samples mailed to us they send those out every day. Not just for the Shaw Repel flooring but other laminate floors and just about all the other floors they carry as well.