dinosaur1, It's hard to see the canes because they mix in with the background of your soil/mulch. Some of those canes look dead to me, but, hard to tell from the the pics. Do you know anyone in your area that grows roses, that could take a look at them and maybe share there expertise with you on pruning, etc. ?

Thanks, all! I've been using 'paint thinner' (with mineral spirits) and steel wool after dry scraping as much as I can with a putty knife. My husband ran out and got some actual 'mineral spirits' today and it cuts the cloudiness best after scrubbing with the paint thinner and steel wool. I'll check the hardware stores in town for the carpet adhesive solvent, and I know we bought a floor scraper when we first got the house so it's around here somewhere... Johnnari, good idea about checking the floor for ghosts! I haven't got to the part by the sides of the fireplace yet, but I did find a patched area at the right side of the archway (in the second photo above) that indicated the wide arch seen now was originally a standard-sized doorway at some point. The room was constructed in two separate remodels starting in 1926, and it has one exterior door to the alley. One of the previous owners rented out rooms and this was likely one of them. There was another entry from the adjacent hallway to the small closet in the room. That entry is now a wall in the hall linen closet. The only way we knew about it was that the room's small closet had two ceiling light fixtures! The room has undergone some hard to interpret changes, but I'm definitely curious now to see if there is a footprint from cabinets flanking the fireplace. The pink on the fireplace is a *smidge* more tolerable now that the green carpeting is going!

A 100% vinyl click together product is submersible in water, has a vinyl/plastic coreboard, and will give you a nice cushion over cement. This floor floats over your concrete. if there is a leak or spill and it gets under the boards, you lift them up, dry it out, and put the floor back down. This is a much better solution than glueing, ceramic tiling of any kind, or an engineered floor. Engineered hardwood has an MDF or HDF scoreboard that will pull moisture in and buckle/warp and pop with prolonged water exposure or gross water exposure. It's a terrible choice for basements. Beware of vinyl flooring with MDF or HDF scoreboard. These coreboards are made of water soluble particles that will pull water in and expand if exposed to constant water.

For me it's not that it's institutional looking but that it can look like the flooring is trying to climb up the cabinetry : ) . It was more of a problem in my current kitchen, in an earlier incarnation, when the flooring was horrid white/gray/mauve vinyl sheet (my husband picked out shortly after we met but before we realized we had a future together, and that the flooring would be in it) and the 1950s wood cabinets were painted off white. Much less of a problem in the new house we're finishing, which has medium brown wood-look vinyl plank flooring and the medium brown Ikea kitchen cabinetry; and the vinyl plank flooring is much sturdier than Ikea's ready-made plastic toekick (and $25 for 84" to boot, too). Black Corian with slate floors sounds as if it should work very well. I also do not know that our society isn't too clean and am trying to embrace more dirt. roarah, we live in a rural farming community, and while I had knew the saying, "You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die" I'd never had anyone actually give me that piece of advice. But I did, when my eldest was born and we were invited to tea with the matriarch of one of the oldest families in the nearby town. There's actually a lot of wisdom to that, and I recall news not too long ago the farm kids have fewer allergies and less asthma than their urban counterparts. For me, it's not just a battle keeping the mud, snow, and straw at the door, but also the fact that between farming and our other home-based business, we're around the house much more than other people are, so furnishings tend to get well-used, which means there's constant tidying as well as cleaning.