OT vacation with a dumpster

My immediate reaction to flooring. Don't even think of ceramic tile. In your world it would probably either crack from the cold ground or worse, if you tried to put a toe on it barefoot, you would freeze to the floor. Even here in sunny FL, it's cold to the bare foot.

Besides that, I hate that it feels like you're standing on concrete, maybe because you are, and is so unforgiving that unless what you drop is soft and mushy, it will break into a gazillion pieces. Even a plastic container from the freezer will crack.

Ask me how I know that !!! lol

Oh, my goodness. I have ceramic floors in my bathroom and laundry room and dearly love them . . . even barefoot in our northern Wisconsin winters. We do have a root cellar, so the temperature down there probably never gets colder than 45 or 50 degrees farenheit.

We have maple floors - no rugs - on all the other floors downstairs and wouldn't part with them. No cold feet. But then, we wear slippers summer and winter (though I occasionally go barefoot in summer).

Upstairs: one room is pine plank (100 years old with a couple scattered rugs and the second bedroom is carpeted. Hate it. We want to do the upstairs with new wood, but the budget just isn't there at present. The downstairs took all we had. :~)

Dianne

tile. =EF=BF=BD In

I'll echo Lucille's sentiments about ceramic tile. I so wish now that when I replaced the ugly brown shag carpeting in my CA house I had replaced the ceramic tile in the entry, kitchen and bathrooms at the same time. I lost more than one top to the sugar bowl to that floor.

Nancy

I love the ceramic floors in the bathroom and laundry room. But I never spend a great deal of time in there. Standing at the sink or stove in the kitchen is a whole other ballgame.

However, I agree that different things are manufactured for a reason, and like/dislike is one good one.

I echo your sentiments - went crazy and used it in kitchen and bathrooms in one house - as you say, very hard standing in the kitchen any length of time. Cold didn't matter, our houses are heated, but somehow doesn't work for me.

I am divided between hardwood and laminate. Love the hardwood but can't argue the laminate is easy to install (you could do it yourself, I did) and people always said 'love all the hardwood' so it's very realistic. The real hardwood (have that here) is more temperamental.

I would definitely go with the laminate. My friend put Pergo all over her house and it's fabulous. Easy to wash and much easier on the feet.

Lucille

I have hard maple floors in the kitchen. It's just as bad as ceramic. But I wouldn't trade it.

Laminate? If price is an obstacle. I installed Bruce flooring myself many years ago (well, my husband at the time, not me). It's tongue and groove and not difficult. The new wood flooring is made for do-it-yourselfers. Bamboo is quite popular at the moment.

I don't find my hardwood floors "temperamental". They do scratch, but that's not difficult to repair. Considering that carpeting should be replaced every 7 or 8 years (due to rot, allergens, et al), wood flooring is no more expensive in the long run. Unless of course you want rugs. Now you're in a different ballgame.

With my two dogs, I am *so* grateful that I have wood floors and little to vacuum!

Dianne

I'll be listening and when I hear you, I'll put the coffee pot on. LOL

Joan

When I got married 35 years ago my ambition was to have a house with NO linoleum. It's taken a while but now we have carpets everywhere. However, I have my secret anti-cramp device - a single ceramic tile in the bedroom; it's always cold so when cramp strikes and your foot is trying to turn itself inside-out just stick it on the cold tile and the cramp quickly recedes.

I suspect she will be looking for something a little stronger lol

I suspect the Scotch I'm nursing would not be strong enough

Dawne, your original post will no doubt arrive later, but I'd make DD do the crawl spaces.

Go for the new cabinets. Make them your taste. As for flooring, I'm leaning toward cork for comfort for the major traffic areas. It's come down quite a bit and I think you could lay it yourself. I happen to love the look of bamboo too and it is soft underfoot.

I'll be pulling for you. I have a milk snake in the yard that loves to startle me as I go to the compost heap. And I think I got stunk the other day, it's not acting like a thorn at all.

Cheryl

Wow - you will be busy. We're spending the next month finishing getting things put in place, the nice wooden blinds up, the house cleaned. And then I'm planning to finally paint. Hoping to finally, finally have a real party.

Plus, we're in the way too much rat-pack stuff - and like you will be getting rid of accumulated "stuff" - much going to charity as it is usable, but we just don't need it.

Flooring - what fun. I redid flooring in DH's old house - in the kitchen - which involved laying a levelling compound so I could install new, lovely, vinyl over the original linoleum. A very warm job - and harder than it looks to keep all level. Also re-did wood floors after yanking carpet, and installed all new shoe molding - have a compound miter saw handy. Happy to share.

Ellice

We had Pergo type stuff (real wood combined with laminate backing) in the prior house - it definitely cleaned up easily. This house - 2000 sq ft of hardwood. We only have 1 rug in the family room right now. Definitely a bit more to maintain as it needs to be mopped with hardwood floor cleaner as opposed to other water stuff.

Love the ceramic in the kitchen, baths - but, I have mats by sink and stove. Not too echoey - but this is very textured kind of large tile. In my NM house, the ceramic tile counters, with the tile floor - what a mistake. Gorgeous floor - but I would never, ever, ever, tile a counter again - no matter how great it looked.

Our friends did their kitchen with this Armstrong compound tile that looks like ceramic, but is softer - looks really good. Not cheap - but very nice.

The other thing that people do now (the last few years) is put a heating mat

- like a thin membrane with a grid of wire heating elements - down on the subfloor, with the tile over it. Friends who did that when choosing ceramic for their lowest level were thrilled. We've seen the mats demo'd on some home reno shows - even in a bathroom. The floor gets a bit warm - it's essentially then a source for radiant heat up into the room space, as well as the tile itself being heated by conduction from the underlying mat.

Ellice

Lol makes me think of when my parents moved to Spain. My mother loved the marble look and had these beautiful (not) countertops throughout the kitchen. Very hard to clean, very unforgiving if a dish hit it too hard and the hateful stains from red wine :)

When I looked after a friend when she had a knee replacement her condo has infloor heating. I hated it - it is not very adjustable, takes too long, and since I don`t like too much heating and tend to (even at

-18C) turn mine off at night it was not something I would want. I have old fashioned baseboard heating and love it, off and I am cool, if I want some heat, five minutes and the whole place can be 20 deg.

I found at her place I resorted to opening my bedroom window at night no matter the temp outside, which is surely a very wasteful method of coping.

Neither DH or I like the sound or look of laminates - we call them "picture of wood" - but we found a good deal on real hardwood with Lumber Liquidators - and really like it. It was cheaper than laminates we found at Home Depot and such. We have slate tile in our entry ways with hardwood elsewhere and a few rugs here and there - so the dogs have something to scratch their backs on :)

The kitchen came with white ceramic tile - which looks lovely when it's clean but otherwise - pain in the behind - always dirty and don't drop anything or it's in a million pieces!

MelissaD

Exactly. Plus, I had white tiles, with a lovely, plum border tile done before the edges. And a set of hand-painted "jazz Kokopelli" figures that we had a local artist do for us. Stupidly, I also used white grout. What was I thinking - I could've used plum - but thought it would look too grid-like. The things we do - and then learn from. That grout was impossible to keep clean. The floors, were however, stunning handmade kind of saltillo tile, with a lovely plum color running through them. Ah, well. I can totally understand your mother WRT this. I only broke 1 thing, IIRC, but was always careful then to run quickly if something started to roll!

We like it cool at night, and I've been known to open a window in the winter, despite the heat being on.

I wonder how old her in-floor heating was. IIRC, originally there wasn't much controlling with it, but I understand some improvements to that have been made in the last couple of years.

Ellice

It's about four years old, I looked at one place, same thing. Fortunately I didn't buy there because I would really dislike it.

I think the only rooms I'd want heated floors would be the baths.

Cheryl