Flooded House a Blessing?

A couple months ago our washing machine 'decided' to 'wash' more then just the clothes that were in it.     

I had started a load of laundry and then the girl's and I headed down to the fairgrounds to watch a rodeo. Thankfully,  during this time, Judy decided to stop by our house to see the new bed that we had built for Marisa.  When she opened the door she got quite the surprise....water!! and lots of it!  The water never shut off when the machine got full so it continued to run and run and run until water had reached our dining room at the far end of the house from the utility room!!!  

That evening we used every towel in the house and the mop to get what we could and then the next couple of days and weeks we started removing our laminate flooring and the old vinyl underneath and then some of the subfloor-it was not a good thing......or was it!?

We also filed a claim with insurance which ended up taking a little over a month before we found out what they were going to help with.  They were willing to cover the costs to replace the laminate but not the carpet so we decided that we would pay the difference to get the living room floor replaced too since we were doing floors and I was pretty sure that the water stains in the living room were not going to come out.

Picking floors can be lots of fun or a headache; there are so many options but thankfully we had a lot of time to think about what we would want so when it came time to go ok at options we had a rough idea of what we were looking for.

  Finally, during the first week of November our floors were installed!!   We decided to go all vinyl in the living room because of maintence/upkeep reasons.  There will probably never be a shortage of 4 legged furry critters around here and messes are much easier to clean up this way.  The Kirby and Rainbow sales people will not be impressed.

  Here is the kitchen. I can't believe the difference that the stone look makes -I love it!!!

  And this pic is just because.  We were hoping that we were going to be able to replace all of the floors but the pennies only stretch so much.  We are hoping to be able to do the bedrooms maybe this next year.  We'll see.  Looking back, this incident was really a blessing.  We needed new floors and even though the timing was not 'ideal', when is it really?