So Rob and I bit the bullet and got a new kitchen floor put in.  We hemmed and hawed because it was a lot more expensive than we thought it was worth but it had to be done.  In fact, I've been waiting for a new floor from the day I bought the house 8 years ago!The old floor had what I referred to as ghetto vinyl tile.  It was horrific and it was coming up pretty easily.  The previous owner obviously had a dog which put lots of scratches in the floor and those scratches trapped dirt and made it very hard to clean.Some of the things that we did in preparation for the flooring were shopping around.  Thanks to some great net tools like servicemagic.com [highly recommended] and the better business bureau website at bbb.org , we were able to get a number of estimates from reliable and highly rated sources.   That certainly gave us a level of confidence in our final vendor selection.Have you heard of servicemagic.com ? It's a service we've come to use for all of our home improvement projects.  It works like this:

   
• you create a free account
   
• you enter the job details [type, time frame etc.]
   
• they contact suitable contractors and provide them the details
   
• the contractors call you and setup appointments to do estimates
   
• you can review contractor reviews submitted by other users
   
• you select a contractor [either from them or not]
   
• if job is completed and you picked their vendor, you rate the vendor

This service was _very_ useful a few years ago when everyone was competing for the limited number of contractors.  Remember those days?In today's economy,  it's a bit easier to get contractors to return calls but nonetheless having access to feedback from other clients is useful in making decisions on who to hire.In addition to servicemagic.com we used the better business bureau website at bbb.org If you're not familiar with them, give it a look.  They break out their sites by geographic location and then you can drill down to see types of contractors and whether they had complaints and whether they are bbb certified.  This is another tool to use when trying to figure out who to hire.So there you have the whole story of our kitchen floor and how we use the net to get the job done.Do you have any other tools you use?  Do share...Here are the pictures of the job:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

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