How far does Flooring Correct travel?

The coverage answer is short, and it is a county answer: St. Charles, Warren, St. Louis and Lincoln, all of it worked out of the one showroom on Veterans Memorial Pkwy. The service area page holds the official version, town by town, with the drive from each one written down. The more useful question underneath it is what your own drive time means, and that is one of the few things about a flooring job you can settle yourself in half a minute. Open a map, put in 15570 Veterans Memorial Pkwy in Wentzville, put in your own address, and read the number. What follows is how to read it, and what it will quietly mislead you about.

Reading the number you got back

The published ends of the range are a good yardstick. Wentzville itself is 2.5 road miles from the store, about 5 minutes. The longest drive named on the map is 36.8 road miles and about 51 minutes. Almost every address worth asking about lands somewhere between those two, and the practical difference is not distance at all. It is what a visit costs in time on both sides.

• Roughly a quarter hour or less. A measure is an errand. A second showroom trip to double check a color is realistic, and so is dropping a sample back.
• Roughly half an hour. Still comfortable, but you will make one or two showroom trips rather than four, so each one should be planned.
• Roughly three quarters of an hour and beyond. Each visit takes a real piece of a day at both ends. Booking earlier matters more, and anything that would normally get sorted out casually should be settled while someone is standing in the room.

Nothing about the work changes across those bands. The crews, the samples and the published order of the job are the same at the far end as at the near one. What changes is how many chances the calendar gives you to change your mind.

The first thing your drive time does not tell you

Whether you are covered is a county question, not a minutes question, and the two do not line up neatly. St. Charles, Warren, St. Louis and Lincoln counties are the boundary. That means two addresses with identical drive times can sit on opposite sides of the answer, because one is inside a covered county and the other is not. Long drives inside the boundary are ordinary. A short drive from a fifth county is the case worth phoning about rather than assuming, in either direction.

This catches people out most often near a county line, where a subdivision on one side of a road and a subdivision on the other belong to different counties and nothing on the ground says so. If you are not sure which county your address is in, the county assessor's record for the parcel will say, and so will a minute on the phone.

The second thing it does not tell you

It tells you nothing about the floor. Drive time is a fact about roads. It has no bearing on which material suits your rooms, what your subfloor is doing, how a plank direction should run or what the transitions will look like. Those are all decided at the address, which is what the in-home measure exists for, and the measure is free at every point on that range. A near address does not get a better answer and a far one does not get a shorter one.

A second test worth running while you are in the map

Ask yourself honestly how many times you would make that drive. Not how many times you could. The answer changes how you should use the showroom. If it is once, then that visit needs to end with samples in the car rather than with a decision made at the rack, because the decision is better made at home anyway. Photograph the rooms in daylight before you come, bring a cabinet door or a paint chip and a piece of whatever is down now, and leave room in the car.

What the drive is actually for

A screen shows you color, badly, and nothing else. It cannot show you sheen, which is the property that decides whether a floor looks calm or shows every footprint. It cannot show texture, and a plank that is embossed to follow its own grain feels and reads differently from one that is smooth under a printed image of grain. It cannot show scale, because a photograph crops the repeat, and a repeat you cannot see in a sample becomes obvious across a whole room. It cannot show you a full tile with real grout joints around it, and grout width changes the look of a tile floor more than the tile does.

Standing on it settles all four in about a minute each. That is the entire argument for the trip, and why people make it from further out is a separate question with its own answer. If you only want to know whether the measure is free where you live, that has a page too. Otherwise call 636-332-0654 with your address and let someone check the map with you.