I'm not sure I'll be much help, since ours isn't quite finished and fully operational yet. It sounds like what we're doing, but I don't have the washer and dryer for that room yet (our main laundry is upstairs), and we're just putting the craft/sewing area together. I can show you renderings of what it will look like finished. It's such a mess right now. We only have the counters and lower cabinets in place, but we sewed on them for Christmas projects and it seemed to work really well. (each corner serves as a sewing station...one for me with sewing-embroidery machine and serger, and one for the kids' machine) I only seem to have a floorplan already on photobucket and I'm at the wrong computer to add others, so I will have to do that later. In the meanwhile, here's the floorplan of the room. The kitchen is off to the right. The door on the left goes outside onto our side porch.

I have a sewing/craft room set up, which I use almost every day. I can't find my camera cable right now, so I can't upload a photo, but I had a thought about your space. You really need a sewing machine space AND a table space because half of sewing is laying out the pattern, cutting, etc. I'm pretty sure I'm at my sewing table at least as much as I am at my machine itself. So, what might work really well for you is to get an old armoire from your local CL, and create something like the attached for the machine itself. Then you could position the table about a foot and a half out from the wall so that the person using it would stand between the wall and table, and could view tv. You could use the space under the table for wheeled carts which could hold storage supplies. Honestly the best storage I have in my craft room is the 8 foot long pegboard I put up. Everything hangs there: scissors, rotary cutters, rotary rulers, tape measures, etc. I can clean up in under two minutes, which helps me keep the area neat. The third element that is critical to the space is an ironing board. You could easily accomodate that by putting a fold-down board on the wall. They even have attractive cabinets for them now. Here is a link that might be useful: Sewing Cabinet from Armoire

Used to sell cork for 6.5 years. I know it very well. The finish on the iCork Floor products can be refreshed. It is designed to be refreshed periodically. That means it can get beaten up and then it can be brought back to life for a few hundred dollars. This can be done over and over again for as long as the floor is structurally sound. Do NOT use glue down in a basement. It is NOT allowed. Use the click together stuff, add a little cork underlay to add more warmth and more sound insulation) and you are off to the races. As everdebz points out, dings and scratches happen. Even tiles start to show the abuse.

One step I took this year that helped a ton is that I put out the word on a local entrepreneurs group I belong to which encourages 1:1 meetings with people to ask if anyone would like to do a project swap 1:1 instead of the standard breakfast or lunch. I would be their minion for 2-3 hours on a project of their choice and then another day the same week, they would be my minion for 2-3 hours on a project of my choice. That was hugely helpful in getting some of these done. It's so much more fun (and effective) to work with someone who will just do what you say while you work (move that box, sort those things into piles, etc.)