When we purchased our home, it was a vision of pale yellow walls with seafoam green plush carpet and an office grade drop ceiling. It was the drop ceiling that started the whole renovation process a year ago.

I always felt bad ripping out the carpet because although it’s not my personal taste, it was brand new. But it had to go since everything was being ripped out. And as luck would have it, we didn’t find beautiful wood floors lurking beneath. Instead, there was linoleum from the 40’s or 50’s on top of plywood which was nailed into the old wood planks. Beneath that was yet another wood floor which I assume was the subfloor for the planks.
So unless we were willing to rip out the old flooring and install new sublfoor, our flooring choices were limited. Our first choice was to use laminate since it’s a floating floor and we could lay it over the old lino. That plan came to a screeching halt when after several attempts we realized that it just wasn’t going to work. The long exterior wall bows outward making it impossible to line up the first row of laminate. And although the floor looks level, it’s way off and all the patch jobs in the floor made it impossible for the laminate to lay flat.

We had to come up with something else and really didn’t want carpet, mostly because we have cats and they like to scratch and carpet in the dining area isn’t my favourite thing. It’s just a disaster waiting to happen. So, off to Home Depot to see what, if any, other options they might have. I happened to find this product called Resilient Flooring. It’s relatively new to Canada so there wasn’t a lot of information on it. We took a box home just to try.

It was very easy to install, (I did the majority of it myself), budget friendly and it’s flexible so it covers all the imperfections of the floor nicely. It’s a vinyl product and 100% waterproof so it’s easy to keep clean especially when a certain feline coughs up a hairball!

This is probably not something you’d use in a higher end house but it’s fine in our little country bumpkin house. This is the American Walnut finish (no baseboards yet, hopefully next month). I like the darker floors, but every little piece of fluff and cat hair shows on it. And I did end up getting an area rug for the living room. It needed something to cozy it up in there plus it’s nice on the tootsies.