Some assembly required

This is going to get expensive, I can tell.

Sometime last year, my sewer backed up, right onto the yucky brown carpet in my basement, making it even yuckier. Stanley Steemer said they wouldn't touch it because it was "black dirt" -- their euphemism, I assume for nasty poopy stuff. I got referrals for a couple of places that did deal with such (thanks, 1crowdedhour). I meant to do something about it one of these days, but days kept passing without anything happening.

But now I have a housemate arriving for an indefinite amount of time, and it seemed only proper to deal with it. So I called the first place on the list, and was informed that if sewage had touched the carpet at all, it couldn't be salvaged. So that meant carpet removal and disposal from the main basement room. The other basement room, the bedroom, hadn't been touched by the flood (it had been more like seepage than an actual flood, after all), and I'd planned to just have it cleaned. But the cleaning people shone their light on it and demonstrated several areas of cat pee, and that, combined with the fact that I hate brown carpeting, led me to tell them to take that out as well.

So the nice guys from KrispyClean (I kid you not) are at this moment removing the carpet and disinfecting and deyucking whatever is left behind. The next step will be to get either suitable basement carpet or some sort of floor cover installed.

Once I'd moved into house improvement mode, the next step seemed less intimidating. My living room has an entirely different flavor of yucky brown carpeting, and I'd planned to hold off doing anything about it while Gandalf was around, because he'd been caught peeing on this carpet several times, and I didn't want to give him the opportunity to do so on new flooring.

But it's a new year, and I am, alas, Gandalfless. After a certain amount of dithering about new carpet versus installing wood flooring, I called Rick Charmoli, who several years ago did a bang-up job removing the yucky brown carpeting (I just don't understand the people who lived here before) and refinishing the wood underneath in other parts of the house. Unfortunately, the living room was an addition, so there isn't any nice wood underneath, just plywood. But Rick says that there's a type of wood that he can install that will match nicely. He's coming over tonight, and I'm in trepidation as to what it can possibly cost. Lots, I'm sure.

But when that's done, there'll be two more mandatory phases to finishing the living room (window treatments and lighting), and two optional phases (an additional rug -- I already have one -- and a nice piece of storage furniture). And then I'll be done. At least until I think of something else I need.

Life was much easier in some ways when I lived in an apartment with hand-me-down furniture from my parents.

Decisions, decisions

Rick the floor guy has come and gone. Once I he finished admiring the floor he'd done a few years ago, he laid out what would be involved in putting in a wood (oak) floor. Bottom line: $4,000 and approximately two weeks. Yowch. I'd been guesstimating (based on, I'll admit, no real data) around half that.

Replacing the carpet with other carpet would be at most half of that.

Question: Do I want a wood floor twice as much as I want carpet?

Answer: I would have said "no way" a few months ago, but I've been getting quite attached to the idea of a wood floor. So...I need to think about it.

Recommendations, advice, and voices of experience solicited.