The earth underground is 50-55 degrees F for much of the USA. Carpet and pad are very good insulators. This is important if you use the basement in the wintertime. Concrete/tile/stone are very poor insulators and the floor will feel cold. Of course, this is not an issue if you have radiant floor heating. Engineered wood or laminate are somewhere in-between for insulating value but not nearly as good as carpet and pad. I think replaceable carpet tiles with attached pad would be the ideal basement floor. I have never used this type of product. I'm not a huge carpet fan, but it works well in our basement with kids. We have a 1/2" nylon pile and standard pad that is soft and easy to clean in a darker color to hide stains. Ours is a bi-level, so we do have regular double hung windows for decent light and the walls are a light color. Insurance will take care of the backup or water heater flood or sump pump failure if it ever happens. Thankfully, our sewer line has no trees between our house and the main. The water heater is also new. The sump pump is the only real risk. I will be installing a battery backup in the near future as the power does go out here fairly often during big thunderstorms when it rains heavily. I have been home on two occasions when I had to bail the sump pump well, very LUCKY!

Momscottagegarden, if your leaves are skeletonized to such an extent they look scorched and brown, there's a good bet you are dealing with some sort of leaf chomper. It's too early for Japanese beetles, so if you are not seeing snails or slugs, then some sort of larvae is more likely than not attacking your leaves. Some of them only show themselves at night, so you may not see them unless you skulk around your garden with a flashlight late into the night. Snails and slugs are pretty easy to spot day or night. If you don't see anything during the day, you might find something during a night time garden walk that looks like a little green caterpillars munching away. In fact, these are not true caterpillars: they are probably the larvae of other insects that lay their eggs on or under your rose leaves. One that has plagued my rose garden this time of year is the rose sawfly. They are a real pest but with a limited schedule for decimating the leaves of roses in your garden and while the leaves are ugly and won't win awards at a rose show, they generally don't kill the plant. If you're on the East Coast, the plague happens once annually in the spring. The variety that feasts on roses on the West Coast has two complete life cycles so they are twice the trouble. I wrote about rose sawfly larvae and have pics of the larvae on my garden blog here: http://thewiedersgarden.blogspot.com/2013/07/unwelcome-guests-roseslug-sawfllies.html Insecticidal soap or even just some clear liquid kitchen soap is often all you need to treat the rose slugs (my blog post explains) but DE will also be affective against either the sawfly larvae or snails or slugs. For my money, if you have it, and you have a problem, I would spread it. I spread it routinely in my garden to catch these kinds of problems early on. It also helps control fleas and other pests in the garden that can become pests for your pets as well. That said, I do agree that identifying the pest is important, but in the meantime, DE is a good product to use for basic, routine pest control and I wouldn't hestitate to use it even if you aren't able to identify the culprit.

Well let's see. Presume a 200# couch with 300# of people on board on 4 legs and each leg is 1 square inch then the pressure is 125 pounds per square inch on the carpet under each leg spread over 1 sq in. Set that couch w/people on a 4ft X 8Ft plywood (25#) and the pressure would be 525 pounds over over 4608 sq in. That approximates the weight of a Hoyer Lift with passenger and operator. The pressure would be 525/4608 = 0.114 psi. So that'd be about 0.09% as much pressure. Plus it's spreadout over 32 feet dontchaakno? That would ruin a carpet? Naw. The only problem would be at the end there'd be a big clean spot where the pad was. =========== If you choose chair mats look for the thickest ones. I bot 2 about 25 years ago and they had both light and heavy duty; heavy was noticebly thicker. I sit on the thick my wife on the light. Chair mats, however, have beveled edges so there'd be trouble at the joints. they leave nice clean areas too. :-) What flumixes me is why Mom, who is completely incapacitated and dependant on others, is dictating what is on the floor.

The only way to do it correctly is to glue the carpet to the floating floor. Later when you take it up both floors will come up together. It is an unconventional way to do it but it will work if done correctly. The carpet and floor will expand and contract together so there will be no buckling of the floor which is a possibility if you try to nail tack strips through the floating floor. Another way to do it is to saw all around the floor about 2 inches from the walls. Then nail the tack strips to the bare floor. In that case you can also install padding as usual (gluing it to the existing floor.) But, it would probably be cheaper to just take up the floor. The only part that may be troublesome is removing the baseboards. I have installed all types of floors for over 40 years.