Hi, the one thing you didn't mention for the mud room is tile, and it's classic for the area - very easy to clean up, but not inappropriately over the top (or expensive) as travertine or something else might be. And while I personally think vinyl is fine in certain areas (mudroom too) I wouldn't have it in the bedrooms, where I think that would be inappropriate.

In my opinion, your best bet is cheap ceramic tile with area rugs you can throw away if necessary. No matter how well you have repaired your leak, sump pumps fail, sewer drains back up, washer hoses fail, hot water heaters fail, they are ALWAYS damp, etc. Even metropolitan sewerage districts sometimes back into people's basements...just ask us Milwaukeeans! I installed ceramic in our basement years ago. Am I ever glad. All we needed for cleanup was a hose and squeegees to push the muck back into the floor drain and plastic rugs to throw out the area rugs in. My neighbors, well, their tasks were much more disgusting and difficult, not to mention costly. I installed our ceramic myself, and ahem, it is beautiful! It wasn't hard, just long, and hard on my knees. We have loved it ever since. And you can buy bound carpet remnants for next to nothing and change them on a whim if you like.

All LVP is actually waterproof. It's a very solid option for basement flooring because of this. That being said though, remember that you should never leave water sitting on your flooring, whatever that flooring, for weeks on end. The water won't damage you LVP, but it will eventually seep through to the bottom floor and gradually cause damage and become a huge insurance problem. You can measure against this though with the installation of a moisture trap depending on your situation. Another thing about LVP, is the option of ER or Embossed in Register. With ER, the texture of the plank matches up perfectly with the register or the original graphic. This means that every grain is captured in detail, including wood knots. An advantage of this is increased surface area so it protects against slipperiness and you from falling. Here's the main link I used to learn about ER and LVP if you'd like more information. I hope this helps!: https://www.reallycheapfloors.com/blog/the-best-flooring-for-basements/

Thanks for all the input so far. Suero - I didn't understand what you were asking about the entrance being in the office, then I looked at the plans again and I totally see where you are coming from. You can't actually tell from the plans, but the entrance is actually at the bottom of the plans - the stairs go down towards the bottom wall, so that at the bottom of the stairs, you see the TV area to your right and the door to the exercise area to your left. The door under the stairs is a closet in the office where my hubby wants to put the router, printer, fax machine, etc. There are only two small windows - one is behind the furnace (go figure) and the other is in part of the basement that is a crawl space (everything above the "top wall" on the plans is only dug out to half-height, so the floor in that area is about waist high if you are standing in the full-height part of the basement. The round thing in the workshop is the water heater - it's actually not there yet (it's under the stairs) but we're moving it to getit out of the middle of our finished area. There's also a central vac along that wall. The big X in the workshop is an area of indented floor with a floor drain -- the PO's of the house used the area to wash their dogs. Also, above that area the ceiling is crazy low -- the upstairs has sort of a sunken foyer so the ceiling there is probably only about 6'6" or so. We have shelves along the left wall that hold all our paint and are using the floor drain to drain the dehumidifier. The workshop area also holds the electrical panel/breaker box. It's really not a suitable area to finish because of the multi-level floor/low ceiling and all the stuff (w/h, central vac, breaker box). Oh, also, the "top wall" in the workshop is an opening to the half-height area that we plan to leave open. This is really hard to explain - perhaps a pic will help (excuse the mess - we've purged a lot of stuff out of the basement since these were taken): To address some of the other concerns you all brought up, I don't expect that hubby will be using loud saws or whatever while someone else is watching TV (for one thing, the tv is primarily for him, LOL!) The workshop is pretty small (the whole darned basement is cramped, to be honest). I mainly just wanted an area where I could do projects - strip a piece of furniture, use the miter saw for a quick cut or two, etc. And somewhere to store my massive collection of paint cans, LOL! Also, as far as finishing the exercise room, the original plan was to have 3 rooms, one being a dedicated exercise room. But when we got down there with our painters tape and marked it out on the floor, the exercise room ended up being so cramped that it felt claustrophobic. And we don't want to finish that whole "unfinished area" because we still have the furnaces and a whole bunch of well stuff (water softener, a few tanks, etc.). So we figured we'd just omit the wall and leave the exercise area as part of a bigger unfinished room. The shelves/desk along the stairs are for my kids - I envision a long countertop with two kneehole openings to serve as "desks" for the kids. I do plan to use the area under the stairs -- part of it will be a closet accessible from the office and the lower part will be accessible from the exercise area for storage of random stuff. And again, the sliding closets along the top are there in part to incorporate the half-height area. Here's a pic to show you what I am dealing with: I want the closets to be about 2 feet deep at the bottom but where the openings to the half-height area are, the shelves will be deeper, going all the way to the back of the columns that support the ceiling there. We should get a lot of toy storage out of this plan, and I want to build the back of one closet such that it will have an access panel to get back to the half-height area (though we'll have an opening in the workshop area, there are some low hanging pipes and beams back there that would make getting something bigger than a box into the other side of the area very hard, so we want a big access panel to get to the other side if we ever need to (our oil tanks are back there, and someday they may need to be replaced.) So because we want to take advantage of the half-height areas and allow for access back there, those closets taking up the whole top wall seem the only way to do it that I can think of. I did enterain the idea of putting the TV built-in into one of the openings, but ruled it out a while ago when my sister pointed out that putting the media stuff along the "top wall" and the toy storage area at the "bottom wall" means that the first thing people see when they walk down the stairs is a whole pile of toy mess. At least flipped so that the TV is along the "bottom" side, the toy mess is tucked up behind the seating area and not the first thing visitors see! Please do keep the opinions coming - you are all giving me a lot to think about and I'd much rather second-guess things now than after it's built!