Goodbye, Tile Floors?

I started off on a wallpaper rant, but the actual first thing on our do-before-we-move-in list involves flooring. The rear addition of the house (added sometime late 70s, early 80s?) has a tile floor, that a previous owner extended into the kitchen. You can see it in the pictures in the wallpaper post. It's not bad tile, and it's been kept very clean--but it's showing its age, nonetheless (do people do half-inch-wide, black grout anymore?). We'd like to replace it with some hardwood flooring product. That was intentionally vague, because, as always, there are a slew of befuddling options. On Monday we had an in-home consultation by a guy we found through Lumber Liquidators. He pulled up the in-floor HVAC vents and looked at the cross-section of subflooring, and we think we might have lucked out: the tile isn't mortared to the actual subfloor, but to an additional layer of plywood on top of the subfloor; as far as I understand it this means we won't necessarily have to chip out all the tiles and cement--just the stuff where the plywood boards meet. SO, labor estimate in hand (we're still considering doing some or all of this ourselves, but we have to admit it's tempting, given that it was actually lower than we expected) we're ready to choose a floor. We don't have moisture or concrete subfloor issues to deal with, so we really have our choice. However, this area encompasses the kitchen and three exterior doors, if you count where Captain Muddypaws will be entering from the yard. An additional consideration is leveling; the floor, especially in the older kitchen area, is noticeably sloped. The flooring guy's recommendation was a floating floor--since the house is likely to settle more, and in different spots. It's sounding like an engineered, prefinished product is our best bet. Now the hard part is finding one we like, that doesn't clash with the rest of the house's beautiful old heart pine floors. We decided it didn't need to match, exactly; just flow from one to the other. We'll be trying to make the big decision this weekend. Here are the frontrunners: Bruce Turlington 3" Lock & Fold, "Wild Cherry/Brandywine" (Hickory):

Bruce Turlington 3" Lock & Fold, "Gunstock" (Oak): and Home Legend 3.5" Hand-scraped Click-Lock, "Gunstock" (Oak): Honestly, I think we'd be happy with a lot of things, as long as there's not half-inch black grout involved. More to come!