Getting the house ready for an appraisal

Tim and I are feeling pretty over the whole mortgage insurance scene.  We're wasting over a hundred dollars a month to make our lender feel better about our reliability.  Never mind the twelve years of timely payments in our old house and the year and a half of timely payments in our new one.  So we're planning on getting our house reappraised this summer in the hopes that it has increased in value enough to allow us to ditch the mortgage insurance.  Tim came up with a number that seems realistic to me (don't ask me how, I didn't entirely follow the math myself) but he also had a concern that is equally realistic.  It is possible that the condition of our dining room floor could lower the value of our house to a point where we'll be stuck throwing away our $100 indefinitely.

The dining room floor has been a sore point for me since the first day of our new home ownership.  I immediately pulled up the carpeting in the room we decided to use as our dining room and found an old pine plank sub floor with a deceptive band of fake wood linoleum around the edge.  The hardwood flooring that is on our second story and (shocker) our basement level does not carry onto our first floor.  My plans of refinishing the hardwood floors that I had assumed would be throughout the home were squashed.  We refinished the second story and just left the dining room floors alone with plans to rethink and regroup.  Fast forward a year and a half and the kids have accumulated quite a few splinters from crawling under the dining room table because we still haven't done a thing with that floor.  Now that we want to get an appraisal we've decided to move forward with putting in new flooring and stop waffling about what that should be.  I've been leaning towards cork from the first.  I've fleetingly considered bamboo or filling in the gaps in the pine floor and painting it, but I always go back to cork in the end.  I love the look, and in my research I've found that it has other good properties as well.  It is warmer and more comfortable to stand and sit on, it's good for people with allergies, and it helps with sound insulation.  We're almost 100% sure that we'll be going with Wicander's Originals Accent cork click and snap planks.

Isn't it pretty?

We just have to decide on how we want the top finished, but hopefully in the next week or so we'll have made our decision and ordered our flooring!  It's exciting to think that we'll finally start working on making our first floor look more like a home.  It makes me want to get moving on fixing the trim on our windows, painting, putting in wainscoting, building the window seat, bookshelves.....  Actually, this all sounds exhausting.  Maybe we'll put this decision off a little longer after all!