Walk on the wild side

 You may walk all over it. But never take it for granted.

Floors are important. This point was driven home particularly hard when I was temporarily without one. For a few weeks during a remodel project, I could walk down my basement stairs and onto an open pit of dirt. This might have been a grand thing were I a small child with bucket and spade, or a diggity dog. My hound could bury her bone, and worse, without the meddlesome bother of actually going out in the Portland rain. Have you ever seen a dog wag its tail while asleep? I'm pretty sure that canine sweet dreams are made of these; dirt floors in basements.

People might prefer some of these.

Check out the new sports court floor, above, designed by Tinker Hatfield for the University of Oregon.  Notice the faint image of trees around the edges? They appear to be looking at the wood floor thinking, "So there is life after death!"

A penny for your thoughts. A few thousand pennies for your floor. For years now, people have argued that pennies are not worth the copper it costs to mint them. This restaurant floor in the Standard Hotel in New York is probably cheaper than tile. We could just pave all city streets with them. That would reflect an economic truth for those considering immigration: America, where the streets are paved in copper!

Or how about glass floors? We've seen them in elevators in Canada and as platforms over the Grand Canyon. How fantastic would it be to have a glass floor in the kitchen so that you could see into the basement? Would that make wearing dresses upstairs completely out of the question? Why settle for a single plane when Glass Stairs makes what look like stairways to heaven. 

I'm floored.

Vivian McInerney is the managing editor of Oregon Home. She can be reached at .