If you are in the Knoxville region of Tennessee and looking to remodel/rebuild/build a house, I would strongly recommend that you swing by Stovers Liquidators, LLC at either their 4505 Ashville Highway location, or their 452 West Broad Street (in Cookeville) warehouse.
To be clear, Knoxville has a positive plethora of building salvage/surplus stores scattered throughout its metropolitan area, and we have probably visited most of them at this point. These stores can have everything from paint to flooring to fixtures (for every room in your house) to stained glass windows saved from old buildings to overruns to returns to seconds to whatever else, and everything inbetween – some of the stuff definitely looks like it might have been there when the current owners bought the building. Stovers is, in general, no different than most of the other salvage stores in the area, except for one noteable difference: their flooring section.
Imagine, if you will, a football field, in its entirety, covered with crates, boxes, pallets, and Lord alone knows what else of hardwood, engineered wood, laminate flooring, vinyl, ceramic tiles, porcelain tiles, stone tiles, glass tiles, and every other form of non-carpet flooring you can think of, and you would have a rough idea of what the flooring section of Stovers looked like. Organization was… limited (the wood-looking items were separated from the stone/tile-looking items, but that was about it), but the aisles were clear and wide, and the prices were very clearly notated.
Speaking of prices, on some items, they were pretty much even with most of the other salvage stores in Knoxville, but on particular items (like the glass tiles I mentioned yesterday), you could save over half on their original prices, and easily 75% or more off regular market prices. Basically, if you wanted what they had on sale/liquidation/closeout, you could escape the store paying almost nothing – for example, decent-grade porcelain tile could be had for a dollar a square foot, simply because its boxes had gotten wet once upon a time. Sure, you had to like the color, but if you did, you were golden.
However, it was not the stock, or even the prices, that sold us on Stovers. Instead, it was the way they handled their customers. Their salespeople were receptive, observant, and helpful, but never once did they come across as smothering or hovering. Hell, they even carried out the eight boxes of glass tiles we had and dropped them in our trunk.
Additionally, given our somewhat odd circumstances (buying the tile before we actually have the house), we were concerned over their policy of no returns on closeout flooring. However, after speaking with the warehouse manager, he added an exception to our sales ticket indicating that we could bring whole boxes of the tiles back for in-store credit if we did not end up closing on the house. As you can obviously guess, this considerate and far-from-required exception worked for us, and they made a sale.
Finally, neither the warehouse manager nor the employees were at all frantic or shocked at me openly carrying my Walther. In the course of our conversation with the manager concerning returns, he casually asked what it was, if I had a permit, and if I worked in the security field, but that small bit of intrusive questioning lead us to commiserating over both of our military histories, and our respective military families’ histories. Sure, I did not have to answer the questions, but there was no harm, we were already getting a favor out of him, and we were on private property that he was accountable for – I certainly do not begrudge him a small bit of situational awareness.
Amazing selection, good prices, outstanding customer service, and a nearly seamless acceptance of lawfully armed citizens – Stovers Liquidators sounds like a damned near perfect store to me.
(You will note that this particular post is not in my “for hire” category – I was paid nothing by anyone to write it, and thus it is not a “sponsored” post. Instead, I am simply expressing my approval of a company that was able to give Better Half and I a more-than-satisfactory shopping experience. Suck it, FTC.)
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