Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Designing around dog-pee: Need flooring ideas!

I need flooring ideas that are compatible with our dog, Murphy, who is an obsessive marker.

Our dining room and hallway are currently covered in hideous fugly stained (not by Murphy) nasty creepy carpet. To give you some perspective, when we moved in I washed it at least six times with the monster rented carpet cleaner and the water was still coming up thick black. I don't like it much - can you tell? There are many days when I want to just rip it up and throw some stain and poly onto the plywood and call it a day, but Von would kill me. Maybe one day this summer, when I'm home while Von's working, I'll do it anyway and blame it on menopause's hormonal madness.

So it has to go, SOON, but our budget is wee-er than a pug's wee-wee: $1000 for 270 sq ft. Clearly the reclaimed heart pine is out of the question, unless someone has some they'd like to give me.

Murphy basically lives in the hallway, where his marking urges are kept to a minimum by having nothing to mark except his bed or his foodbowl or his new baby sister Lucy. So whatever we put on the floors has to be able to endure the occasional splatter of dog pee in relatively small quantities, but which may be there for a few hours until we notice it. Plus it has to endure the regular click of dog nails from one regular resident and two frequent passers-by (old man Max lives in the office just off the hallway most of the time, little Lucy is the only one with free run of the house).

Do you have any ideas? We don't want tile (standard ceramic or vinyl), unless you can spin a convincing story as to how it could look fantastic if we did it THIS way. It also has to not suck look decent when seen next to the original heart-pine floors in some of the adjacent rooms, and definitely look something better than blah-on-blah when seen next to the cheap generic light beige ceramic tiles that are in the adjoining kitchen, mudroom, and laundry room (and only the laundry room has a door).

We'd prefer something that we can super-seal, particularly in the hallway, to build up the pee-resistance.

But also for perspective, where he has marked on the original floors (which desperately need to be refinished), even if it's clear that it's set there for a few hours, there doesn't seem to be any damage to the floor.

Please help us think outside the litterbox.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hmm, what about those linolium tiles they use in school cafeteria but do a funky color pairing like red and black checkered?