Tile-Looking Carpet---Seriously?!?

My name is Kari and I have carpet in the kitchen....Oh no, I said it.  Now everyone knows!  It looks like tile, but it's not!!  I also have very plush gray/blue extremely stained from the previous owner and maybe a little from my kids carpet in the dining room.  NEVER NEVER NEVER put carpet in a dining room!  With that being said I was at an impasse for what to do with the kitchen and dining room floor.  In a world where money is no option and dollas' freely flow from my wallet which would never happen because I am too frugal I would get wide-planked hand-scraped hardwood flooring!  Eventually, I will (over many years) save up for my dream floor.  Until then, I had to find another alternative.

Here are some pictures of my dream floor:

I love the brick too!!

Swoon!

This floor is so fantastic! I want Walnut flooring, I love all the multiple colors!

  Until then I have found a few alternatives and I think these are cool too!!
Plywood flooring, I know plywood.  I thought, "Are you kidding me?"  Then I researched it and was very surprised! 
I first came across the idea when I found Quarry Orchard from another blog (yes, I skip from blog to blog like a monkey swinging from the vines!)  They actually made a planked floor out of plywood.  If you click their name it will take you to a tutorial about  it!!  Here are some of their pics:

Awesome, this cost them around $1 per sq foot!  Then I was intrigued and decided to google plywood floor.
Check these out:

plywood tile

 

Fantastic!

lovely!

$1 per square foot isn't bad....but I can do better than that.  All of these people just added plywood to their subfloors.  My subfloor is plywood.  Why would I add more plywood, if I could just use that?
Then I googled subfloor to see if anyone else had ever done this as an alternative.  They had, check these out:

Little Blue Chairs' Blog

I love the huge checker board pattern!

Coastal Living

Design Sponge

Another Large Checkerboard

Oooo Diagonals!

I like the border around the edge, definitely doing this for ours.  It looks more finished.

Loving this!  I'm thinking I like the colors and worn look for this floor!

I like the idea of striped too, because this would be much easier than checkerboard.

This could be an easy alternative to checkerboard, because you could just use really wide painters tape!

This is nice and I love the ceiling!!

So what do you think?  I am still looking for more ideas, but I am pretty sure I'm going with one of these!

  But, which one????

Make your life beautiful!
-Kari