Construction/reno suggestions

We have a 'dog room' off the kitchen that works great and will be much better soon, this weekend we're repairing the floor and replacing the stick on tile layers (there are two layers of tiles in some places, down to wood in others, bad idea!). The new floor will be vinyl and all one sheet, no seams, easy to deal with and not hard to replace either since the room is 12 feet minus a bit and the flooring comes on a 12 foot roll.

The dogs have a dog door out to their run, and at the moment are either out or in, and rotated between a double xpen and the house in shifts (one herds the cats non stop, the other bugs the cats and gets into chaos usually and the puppy isn't too bad but all three at the same time means the house gets trashed). I don't like them going in and out all day through the house, as Storee will go in the wading pool, then get mucky, then hop on our bed etc....

So they are getting an indoor run built in, it will double as a puppy pen when the time comes too. Right now the walls in that room are wood strips that look like siding, it's pretty I suppose but a pain to clean and the dogs have figured out easy to remove to chew on - they've done some damage to one section so that'll get fixed at the same time.

What we are going to do is pull the siding stuff totally off, and replace the lower 3 feet with something - that's what I'm debating on. Puckboard seems like a good idea but so far hard to find sources of it other than the full thick stuff which we really don't quite need. We don't have experience with tile so don't want to quite go there, but are considering it. Another thought I had was we can purchase sections of vinyl flooring at home depot and get enough to do the space for $40 - cut in half and put onto plywood.

Any thoughts? I'm leaning towards the flooring since it'd be just one seam, easy to wipe down and not much to replace if totally needed. A friend has tile on her walls and it's good too but likely more than the flooring.....

The dog daycare where I worked years ago used this sort of plastic paneling on the walls - looked nice and was super easy to clean and durable.

Similar stuff: http://www.lowes.com/ProductDisplay...gId=10051&cmRelshp=req&rel=nofollow&cId=PDIO1

If you did lino, it would look especially nice if it was a pattern designed to look like tile or slate vs. typical lino with the fake grout lines, shiny finish, and such.

If we ever build a house I'm totally having a dog bathing station in our mudroom and I'll tile it like this:





This one uses metal siding!

droool...

The stuff I'm thinking of looks like slate tile, not shiny. The floor is actually the same idea, not white so it won't show dirt as much and so on.

I'd love a washbay out there but really we're here for another 3-4 years at the most unless things go horribly wrong, so not worth it. Where I work they have a washbay that's tiled and so nice, with cupboards underneath. The only thing I would change is I would make it lower, so you don't have to use a step stool to wash a dog, and I'd put some sort of floor on it that drained (like peg board but not wood, so the dog's feet didn't stay in the water) and then put a roof and door on that slid into place, not sealed of course, but with a fan set up so that after the dog is bathed, they could stay in place and start drying off there before being moved to dry out. So far I have two dogs that need 'swimsuits' to dry with proper looking coats, so that would work well for me to have the worst of the water off them then put their suits on to finish drying.

For now I have the one at work to use as needed at least.