We are going builddirect.com for wood floors. 50% cheaper for same quality and hiring local installer.

Give your local flooring store a chance! You may be pleasantly surprised at how competitive local stores can be for pricing, and you can feel comfortable knowing that you are purchasing first quality material, not flooring that has been milled poorly and thus sold at a lower price because it is not first quality.

Thanks everyone and I do agree with all the comments. I usually do not go to HD or Lowe's for this type of project, but I'm trying to be creative on how to fit my budget to complete my house renovation. I was thinking I was going to use HD or Lowe's for some of the work and take advantage of the 6 months financing.

All I can say for HD (I can't talk about Lowe's because I haven't heard any complaints from clients) is they have offered the wrong advice for my flooring/cork flooring/hardwood. I know of 6 seperate floors that have been ruined by HD advice. And I mean, the advice they gave voided the warranty of my product or even caused the finish on my floors (water based polyurethane) to bubble and peel. Ruined. $$$ worth of cork flooring ruined by HD advice.

Buy your paint, caulking, cement patch, drywall, wall paper, etc. from them but try to stay away from any "big ticket" items...like floors, doors and windows, roofs, etc.

I agree. We have only once done a remodel where the customer bought all of the products at HD and HD did the full design on the project - we were hired after everything was picked out and the design was done. The designer missed some very critical measurements (removing load bearing walls and they didn't understand the requirements) and it could have cost the client a lot of money. We were able to get an engineer in to resolve the issues with only a little extra cost. The flooring they sold the customer was horrible. It was so thin that it was ruined within a couple of weeks. Messed up the window and door order and put the project behind by several weeks waiting on new door so we could get framing inspection and move forward. Would be my recommendation to stay away from big box stores.

The hardwood and engineering flooring HD, Lowes and Lumber Liquidators sells is of inferior quality which is why is so much cheaper. A lot of it is seconds and scraps, and the wood isn't dried long enough so it cups onces it's down. If you want to read about this, check out pissedconsumer.com and search Lumber Liquidators.

I appreciate all the comments and stories. This is very helpful!

I don't know who has the FLOORING I would use but, I'm a HD guy.