Flooring can be difficult to navigate with so many options and so much pressure to pick the perfect base for your home. But experts in flooring, such as Buffy Stancill, co-founder and owner of Faith and Grace Flooring in Murfreesboro aim to ease the process of decision-making and bring back the excitement of designing the home. Stancill discusses the beginnings of Faith and Grace Flooring, the goals, and the current trends from her own experience in the flooring industry.
“My husband is from Dalton, Georgia, which is where most flooring is made, says Stancill. "So when I was looking to put new flooring in my home, he took it upon himself to go down to Dalton and find what I was looking for at a fraction of the cost. After a little while of looking we found it, and a local installer, for one-third of the price that a chain retailer was offering, which made us realize that people were getting ripped off by the market. So we just started distributing flooring out of our garage. We made an office upstairs and, long story short, two months later we had an up-and-running business. One thing led to another and four months later, in February of 2022, we purchased a local store in Murfreesboro and it’s just blossomed from there,” continues Stancill. “As of January 1, 2024, we took over and bought Creative Flooring of Pensacola, Florida. So we now have two locations in Murfreesboro and one in Pensacola.”
Homeowners find that trusting their gut and getting expert help makes picking the right flooring both easy to navigate and enjoyable.
“When homeowners start looking at flooring options, I always tell them to go with their gut because they usually come in with a general idea of what they’re looking for," says Stancill. "The worst thing that they can do is walk into the store and say that ‘they’re just looking’ because it can be an overwhelming process. There are just so many options with hundreds of styles and thousands of colors. So it’s important that customers take the help of the employees. We want to help with the process and minimize the stress of choosing a flooring option that they love.”
“Once they come to a decision about what type of product they’re looking for, I ask them ‘why?’. And then I ask them to tell me about their home: what kind of environment are they looking to create, what is the color scheme, what are they matching the flooring to in the rooms? It might steer them in a completely different direction just by sparking their imagination, but they always have time to decide. We never make a decision in the store for somebody’s home. I always send them home with samples because flooring has to be seen in your home. Your home’s light, next to your cabinets, at morning, and at night because it can look different ways. It’s all about talking our clients through the process in a way that minimizes stress but finds a product to complement their home.”
Stancill and her team at Faith and Grace Flooring look to use their expertise in the area as a tool for homeowners to find exactly what they are looking for to set the tone.
“Flooring sets the mood for the whole entire home," says Stancill. "It’s everything. It can change the environment in a heartbeat. I’ve changed the color of my own hardwood floors three times, and last time I went from a darker color to a bleached oak, making the biggest difference and brightening up the whole home. Flooring can make a home look cozy, cold, traditional, modern, or any other mood that you are wanting to set. You can’t be a modern home with a golden oak hardwood floor; that just doesn’t work. Everything starts with the base of the flooring and paint on the wall. They go hand in hand.”
As the styles of homes change, so do the common flooring options. Trends for this fall are predicted to continue in the direction they’ve headed with more modern finishes.
“Recently we’ve been seeing a lot of light floors," says Stancill. "There are people who will always go for a more traditional floor, but those who are trying to be more on-trend are choosing a white oak with a larger plank, which usually looks like a width of seven to nine inches. Even hardwood comes in those wider planks now. But aside from the trends, it really is all about what the customer is going for and how we can make that happen." FaithAndGraceFlooring.com