"You really have to be careful though, even the so called pros don't know what they are doing." Donna is SO RIGHT, as I've also learned by hard experience. And some builders fall into this category as well. Do what floorguy says, and go to the website as well, and get someone who really knows what they're doing. Otherwise, just go the safe route and stick with what the builder is offering and it will probably be OK. I don't know that website, but am sure if floorguy thinks it's good, it is. When I had a sticky situation with my hardwood flooring, I finally did all my own research -- the so-called experts being worse than useless, trying to get me to accept a bandaid on the problem instead of a solution -- and I finally found a really good source of flooring experts. Link below. You can find a list of certified installers, and they are throughout the country. PS in my opinion, wide planks are really beautiful, as are random width planks. I have oak normal planks. If I get to choose again, I will select something like cherry, in random width planks. BUT, honestly, it is going to be beautiful whatever width it is, there is just nothing like a hardwood floor of any type. It's going to be OK, just do your homework the best you can, and it will be fine. Here is a link that might be useful: Certified Floorcovering Installers

We got one of the delta's touch20 for an adjoining powder room. We have had nearly every part replaced and have yet to get it to function with touch less feature! Responsive support hotline but still not functioning. We may have to eat the cost of it since it was purchased prior to jan demo. Ugh! (We need touch less since we raw feed our dog). My DH refuses to chalk it off as a loss at this point, so he has his own little project to focus on. :-)

Aussies, Someone on the list sent me 5 foot long boards of their BR-111 Triangulo Brazilian Cherry Engineered Hardwood floors they had stored in their closet since 2.5 years ago. The lighter boards look just like the samples I have from a local store of the solid wood BR-111 3" Amendoim foot long boards. The store told me they had now bigger samples that were much nicer than these old samples and I could keep them. Well the boards are helping me see that I like the 3.25" wide plank a lot. I like that width much better than the 2.25" width and the 3" width. Somehow the little bit extra width looks nice without being too skinny or too wide. I am still confused and I must make a decision since this has been on my mind since my water damage from my central air conditioner unit dying on me in June. I have decided on my tile for my two foyers but I keep going back and forth on three species for my living room, dining room and family room. I guess I like a lot the two engineered wood species (BR-111 Triangulo Engineered Brazilian Cherry and the Amendoim) and the Bruce Park Avenue Makore Laminate. The Makore has a red tint when near my cherry office furniture and actually looks very real and pretty. It is a 5" width plank (which is nice and may look great or in my small space may look not as nice as the 3.25" wide plank) and is amazingly so resistant to dents an scratches and is about the color of the Amendoim. The Makore also has longer boards. The negative of the Makore is I wish it has a semi-gloss shine and not a high gloss shine that shows smudges on it. The samples of the BR-111 on my floor have no smudges and due to being less glossy look so clean and look like they will be low maintenance. At least the Amendoim will not change color as much as the Brazilian Cherry (my fear is that parts of the room with no windows will look like a totally different floor). I love the cherry color of the Brazilian Cherry but my interior townhouse does not have windows on more than one wall and one of the rooms of my two room office has no windows so maybe the darker cherry floor will appear dark brown and not cherry. I do love both grains in both floors so much since they are not the rotary peel engineered oak that I currently have in my foyer from Bruce that I do not like and it has faded in one of the foyers and the other one is all warped and darkened from the water damage. I love how each boards looks so unique on both floors. I am going to test these sample boards outside in the next few days. I wish I had some foot long sample boards of the Amendoim also since most of my samples are so tiny of the engineered wood boards. What I do like about the Makore is it is easy to clean and again seems to sturdy and is a very nice exotic look.

@dough71 - It "sounds" nice to hear that you need 2' lengths for closets. But long planks will be CUT throughout the job, leaving a pile of shorts. Those shorts are then recycled to finish rows or go inside closets. A dealer who speaks of average lengths and then mentions the 2' shorts is trying to shuffle in the low-low end stuff so HE isn't left with waste. I would ask the PERCENTAGE of 2' lengths you can expect to receive. Houzz has seen DOZENS (if not hundreds) of posters complain that their "promised" 8' planks arrived as a bunch of 4' planks making up 50% of the load. And not enough overage to "cull" the shorts. As for your question about seeing homes with wide planks that look great, you are correct. But I'm going to add a caveat to that statement. Those old, wide boards have reached an equilibrium and are now in harmony with it's house. That can take 20+ years to achieve. And then they have probably already received a sand/refinish with "knocked down" the crowning/cupping to make the whole floor look flat and happy. Let's just say that the "growing pains" of those old, wide planked floors are WELL behind them and they now LOOK happy...but they started out a complete mess...for many decades. Then a sand/refinish occurred and NOW they look awesome! That's how old wide planks in old unconditioned homes "look great". They've already finished their rebellious years.