13 Still running behind

Yesterday's blog mentioned that we are looking to replace some flooring. Janet commented and asked what type of floor were we looking at. Since I'm (still) a day behind blogging and need to write two today to get caught up, I thought it would make a good topic for one of the blogs.

First let me give a run down of whole house situation. Our home is a 1974 ranch home which we rented first then later purchased. We've lived in this house since January of 1991. The house has three bedrooms, two baths, kitchen with breakfast area, dining room, living room, and den. There is also an attached garage which is technically a 2-car size but the dummy who closed off the original carport installed a single size door so we can only get one car in the garage.

When we first moved in the house was pretty much still stuck in 1974. We've done some up grading along the way but never anything major due to a severe lack of funds. I'm one that's never satisfied with leaving things the same for too long so I'm always slapping paint on the walls, moving furniture around, etc, ... anything to keep things from getting stale. Several years ago I decided I needed more than just a corner in a room for my craft area. I also thought it was silly to have a living room and a den. A natural conclusion was to change up the function of one of those rooms. The end result was our living room became our family room, the den became the dining room, and the old dining room became my craft room.

When we first moved in we had new carpet installed throughout the house. With two boys, two dogs, and numerous cats you can imagine the wear and tear that's occurred on the carpet over time. Several years ago we did some major ripping out of carpet in the main living areas. We put down laminate plank flooring in the family room. I left my craft room, which was the old dining room, with no flooring, just the concrete slab (yay, no more worries about dripping paint and all other kinds of craft mediums on the floor). The floor in the dining room (old den) was a linoleum floor that was supposed to look like wood (the key word here is "supposed to"). We had the (hair-brained) idea to paint the linoleum a medium tan color. For awhile it looked pretty good but before long, with the boys and pets coming and going, the floor really began to look worn. We talked about re-doing it but never got around to it, mostly because of the disruption it would cause due to the fact this room is the major through-way to get to to the kitchen. Also, I hated the thought of putting in a new floor as long as we still had two dogs in the house. So, for several years we let it be and all the while it continued to get uglier and uglier.

If you're a regular reader you know we lost both of our dogs within a six month time frame. We've also recently come into some unexpected funds and so we've decided it's time to do something about this awful floor. What I'd really like to do is rip out all of the remaining carpet in the house and have hardwood install throughout. Well, that isn't going to happen - it's not that much money and what we do have must be prudently used. The flooring we want to put down we actually saw at a friends house and think it's really a good choice for this room. It's something we can easily install ourselves. It is a resilient tile flooring made by Traffic Master called Allure. These are the three patterns we are looking at - I think I like the 2nd one the best and Dale agrees. It would be nice if we could get everything in order and do this project next week when the boys are home for Thanksgiving. Wouldn't this make a great family project?!