And the floors look like crap.....

(I wrote this some time back, the front room floor is mostly in now.)
Well, they do.  And they have for a long time.  I mean, I will bet the carpets are 19 years old, just as the house is.  Rose, the former owner, wanted to do something with the floors but didn't get around to it.
Grey/taupe carpet and black and white linoleum in the kitchen. The kitchen really wasn't too bad.  The same carpet in the three bedrooms and blue carpet in one bathroom. The big bathroom has some kind of stick down tile that also isn't half bad.  But it's all going.
When Jerry got down here in late August, we tore up the carpet in all three bedrooms and put down Allure.  It wasn't hard to do but is hard to cut and Jerry was in charge of that.  I actually laid this stuff down and would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to try this themselves.  There is a knack to it but once you get it after ruining a few pieces, you will be fine.  It's a floating floor, a vinyl plank kind of floor and you get it at Home Depot, which has a huge variety of colors in it.  There are two sides of the plank that have sticky stuff sticking up and two sides have it sticking down.  So the planks basically are "glued" together by putting the up/down pieces together like a piece of velcro.  Lowe's has something similar except that the sticky part is really narrow, like 1/8th of an inch.  Not enough!  The Allure is about an inch wide on the glue strip parts.  
So far, the Allure has withstood several accidents by Hayley, who is 15 1/2 years old.  No one has puked on it, yet, but I'm sure that will happen.  After all, it's a household in which dogs outnumber humans.  And the #1 rule of dogs is....someone must puke at least once a week.  In any case, the floor has cleaned up beautifully.  Stay tuned and in 10 years I will give a report on the condition of the floor.

We started this in one of the smaller bedrooms.  The carpet was torn out and the staples pulled up.  Pulling up the staples was the worst thing about the job, I think.  Little buggers took quite a bit to get up.  Then we put down tarpaper as a vapor barrier and stapled that down.  Then the wood below the actual flooring, called Luan, and 1/4 of an inch thick, was put down.  Finally we started to lay the planks down. The grey/blue part is the "up" part that is sticky, on two sides.  On the opposite sides, the sticky part is down.  It reminds me of velcro, when it sticks together, it really sticks!  I had to pull it apart a time or two because I'd let just a very tiny "crack" inbetween and wanted it to be totally tight.  Man was that hard to do!

Of course, Hayley had to come in and "help".  She is 15 1/2 and once she paces about a little while, seems to find a good spot and so long as she is close to us, she is happy and goes to sleep.  We just kind of slide her around while she is asleep if she is in the way:

Here are some closeups of how it all looks:

We chose the same heat registers to go throughout the whole house.  While we were laying the flooring down, Hayley had a gift for walking around and "falling" into the vent holes.   We were bad and laughed at her... :) 
(Also written a while back while I tried to figure out how to load the pictures!)

Tomorrow is the big day, though!  Last month there was a sale on 13 x 13 inch cream colored ceramic tile at Lowe's and so I went and got something like 1,000 pieces.  That will do the main part of the house, the front/dining rooms and the kitchen and dinette (currently where the dog crates are) area.  And the little hall leading to the little bathroom.  I bought enough extra to do the baths, but they need some updating badly before we lay down tile in there.  We chose a darker grout, called chamois, and some decorative tile to put in the kitchen, just a bit, for emphasis.  We also got some tile the same size only in a lighter coffee color, to put in front of the fireplace to give the illusion of a sort of hearth, and the decorative stuff will go around the edge of that.
We will put down a vapor barrier, then the hardy board which will be screwed into the floor, then glue the tile down after cutting it and placing it.  It has to sit for 24 hours to dry, then the grouting goes on.  We hope to get the subflooring and glueing process done tomorrow, the grouting on Thursday.  And the sealing of the grouting done on Friday.  This will be for the front and dining rooms.  (This actually took quite a bit longer than we anticipated....but it is done now and looks fabulous!)
And here's the really pathetic part...our bedroom opens off of the front room. With no outside door.  We basically were looking at living in half of the house at once, one side has the bedroom/bath and front/dining rooms.  The other half has the kitchen, dinette area, tiny bath and two extra bedrooms.  Hmmmmmm....So one way we have a great bathroom and comfortable bedroom but no fridge.  The other way we have a fridge and a tiny little barely double bed.  And of course, the dogs' crates have to be moved from one side to the other.  And all the furniture goes...somewhere.  A lot probably in the front yard and please, God, don't let it rain!
So Jerry came up with a solution.  I don't know if it will work but it at least could make things easier.  We can climb thru the bathroom window at bed time.  Yeah, I know, it sounded stupid to me, too, until I thought about sleeping in my own bed at night.  And using the better bathroom.  And having a tv because the front room will be unavailable and no internet, either.  (sigh)  So I really think this could work.  I won't have to move my work clothes to the other side of the house, etc.  I don't think the dogs will be too happy, but Hayley can still sleep with us.  And she won't be too much to lift in and out of the window.
I hope I don't break my neck!
(Well, it ended up that we were able to go with a Plan B, thankfully.  The tile was laid up to half of the bedroom door so no climbing in and out of the window.)  And here are the photos:

This is the floor after the subflooring was all put down. Piles of tile over to the right hand side of the room, just some of it.  That's Jasmine lying on the couch.  And the little temporary computer table I was using.  It will be used as my sewing machine table when I get that far.

Wow, just a little bit different, huh? Wow, wow, wow!  Here is in front of the sliding glass door into the back yard:

Looking back across the room towards the kitchen.  The floor was about half done at this point.

How do you like the fireplace area?  Close ups to follow:

There is still scuzzy stuff on the tile, that needed to be mopped but I couldn't wait to take the photo!  And we have gas logs in the fireplace and I LOVE THEM!

We added a corgi to the picture for authenticity:

The only thing that is lacking is the baseboard.  Jerry has treated the grout with a sealer.  The baseboard is in part of the room so we could move the heavy furniture against the wall.  I'll send photos again when the room is done.
So this week the floor guy is back again and maybe in another few days we will have a completed kitchen!  Wheee!