Alternate post title: How to Get a Deal on Anything
So I’m absurdly excited to announce that I bought enough solid bamboo flooring for our ENTIRE HOUSE. That’s right, not just the upstairs. THE WHOLE HOUSE! I am a firm believer that having coherent flooring in a tiny house helps to make it feel more spacious and connected from room to room, so I was hoping to get flooring that I could continue throughout our house. However, considering our student loans, doubling the square footage of our flooring order was going to be tough on our budget. That is especially true because I was only really considering two types of relatively expensive flooring options: solid bamboo and solid hardwood. I wrote another post to describe why that is, which you can read here.
Now, drum roll please, because I bought 1300 square feet of solid bamboo flooring for $1.69 per square foot, or about $2200! Anyone who has shopped bamboo flooring before knows that you can get engineered bamboo for around this price, but solid bamboo is usually at least double the price. We were expecting to pay that much just for our flooring upstairs. So cutting the price per square foot in half made flooring the whole house a no-brainer! But how did I score this excellent deal? I’m about to tell you.
- The key ingredient to a great flooring deal (and many great deals) is patience. If you don’t have time to wait for a good deal, it’s unlikely you’ll find one. Lucky for me, I started feeling out my flooring options in November, and we’re still probably a good month or more away from laying our upstairs flooring, so if I hadn’t found this flooring, I’d still be scouting. Patience allows you to wait for things like 20-60% off flooring and free shipping from online retailers. That’s the deal that was running on iFloor.com when I bought our flooring. I use this method for other things I like too, but don’t want to pay full price for. I save items to idea boards or email them to myself and check back every month or so, especially around Black Friday/Cyber Monday, or in the spring when lots of store do “Spring Cleaning” sales. This can also work in person if you’re willing to walk away from a deal. Often people will do something to help you out if they can when you’re heading for the door. Seth does this frequently.
- Shop multiple stores or online retailers. Flooring comparable to what we bought was anywhere from $3.69 – $9.85 per square foot depending on where I looked. iFloor had the best full price at $3.37 per square foot. Lumber Liquidators was close with $3.69, but I refuse to buy from them for environmental reasons. Cali Bamboo and BuildDirect.com had great products but at more than double the prices of iFloor.com, buying from them would have blown our budget even if we only outfitted our upstairs!
- Be open to improvising. Part of the reason we got this flooring so cheap is that they no longer had any of the accessories to go with the flooring. They didn’t have T-molds to go in doorways or stair noses. I considered skipping out on the deal since we need both of those things, but the easiest option isn’t the only option. I have a friend who is willing to try making these things for us, and if that doesn’t work out, I can always go to Home Depot and get unfinished stair noses and T-molds and stain them to match. If they’re not 100% perfect they’ll be close enough to make a killer deal worth it.
- Always Google for a promo code. It doesn’t always work, and I didn’t get any extra savings on our flooring with a promo code, but it’s worth the ten seconds it takes to check. I used a promo code to buy three awesome light fixtures that I loved for the price of one on Cyber Monday. I got free shipping and 5% off our tile order for the upstairs bathroom just by using Google. It never hurts to take a peek.
- Buy it used if you can. I obviously didn’t do this for our flooring, but Seth and I often buy things used to save some cash. We have an antique buffet that hides some of our extra kitchen appliances and houses our liquor collection that we found on Craigslist for $100. A brand new similarly sized piece of furniture could easily cost us $400 or more. Instead of buying a new hollow core door for the upstairs bathroom ($40 or so), we stopped by an architectural salvage yard. We got a set of slim double doors complete with hardware for $10, and they have way more character than what we would have gotten at the hardware store.
So there you have it. My five best tips for scoring a killer deal on flooring, furniture, or anything you happen to need to make your house feel like home. Feel free to share your most unbelievable deals with us!