11/4/19 I Want Nice Wood Floors, Wife Wants Brown Cardboard?

    I am not an expert of course on floors, carpeting, tile or wood, but I do know that if you want something nice, it usually has a price to match.  We have been looking at flooring options for our house for the last few months in anticipation to start replacing the floors in our house.  I want to wait until the new year and do it room by room as we get some money to buy the flooring cash.  I would also like to save some money by doing the work ourselves, but Wife says that would be the end of me as I already hurt every time I do a small project on my knees.
    The biggest problem is that Wife is horribly cheap, always has been.  She has even suggested we could just pull up the nasty carpets and we paint the concrete, like we're bohemians or freaking hippies.  I don't want that look, even if someone on HGTV made it look cool once.  I have been saying I want wood floors, but to her wood floors are the same, whether they are from a tree or vinyl look-a-likes.  I want as she says to eat into the rain forest and put down some beautiful rare looking wood that might cost a pretty penny, but will be ours for the rest of our lives.  I have been "reasonable" and chosen woods, and by woods I am even giving in to engineered woods even if I prefer the idea of solid hardwoods, that are around $4.00/sq ft.  I want to look at my floors and say they are wood floors, not "well, technically they are wood floors but really they are 80% resin and filler and 5% wood byproducts, but they look pretty good.  F that, I want to scratch the surface and you find more wood underneath.  The biggest problem of course, is the price.
    When I say around $4.00 a square foot, that gives you a little breathing room to look at different woods and widths and colors.  Oak is the wood most everybody is used to looking at and it is nice, but pecan and hickory and acacia have these explosive colors, from dark black to almost a light tan, with all sorts of pretty veining.  Wife, on the other hand, gets excited about anything, even the vinyl boxes that go for $1.00 or less, yeah, you can get vinyl for even .69 cents a square foot, but I am not sure if you can call them wood floors at that point.
    In my attempts to be even keeled, I have then suggested maybe we should just go with carpeting in some of the rooms, to keep costs down.  I am not even sure if carpeting is that much cheaper, to be honest, but I know it is easier for Wife to accept carpeting at whatever price than wood.  I am sure I will get her to come my way, eventually.  I suggested she let me try and do one of the smaller rooms up in the front of the house by myself.  If this works out, I can see her letting me keep going, and if I have to do it this way to install a quality material, so be it.  She is already wavering as she has "jokingly" suggested to go to Mexico to buy the materials for cheaper.  I know that that's how Daddy might have done it in the 70's and/or 80's, but bullshit that I am going to cross the border nowadays to save $20 on some suspicious wood and possibly meet up with some cartel crap, and yes, in my head Mexico is run amok with drugs and nobody has it under control.  No thanks.