No Rest For the Weary

The flooring did get here on Wednesday. Hurrah!

A review of the end of last week.
Wednesday: Flooring arrived. Window and door trim is cut and painted.
Thursday: Sanded and primed window frames.
Friday: Ripped out subfloor, installed hardibacker for tile entry, paint window frames and level the floor.

And then the big weekend. Ducky took the boys to the beach for two days of Daddy time. So while they perused a sand castle building contest, were awed by sharks and touched starfish, I became a one woman remodeling show.

After seeing the boys off, I set to work on the tile. Or at least that was the plan. A little help was enlisted from down the street to get those big 18 inch tiles installed. But by early-mid afternoon, there was a beautiful, level, perfect tile floor just inside my front door. Yahoo, off to a great start. We'll be ready to move in tomorrow!

Moving down the list, measure and cut baseboard. Have I mentioned that I don't love bay windows? Now having to compute angles and get them to match when our house is anything but precise. So forget the bay window baseboards for now, my window for sawing is limited. I still want the neighbors to speak to me after all of this.

The fabulous click-lock flooring shouldn't take that long to put in, right? It should be in by bedtime.

Oops, laying plastic underlayment is much more time consuming and challenging that it appears. 9pm. There are three half rows installed. Uh-oh. And I have not had dinner. So clean up the mess, drive to the nearest drive-thru, get dinner, eat dinner and get back to work. Put up the saw horses in the kitchen and commence painting those baseboards. 1:30am. Collapse in bed.

7:24am. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, work is waiting. Shut the blinds, crawl back in bed and go back to sleep. 10:34am. Stagger out of bed, irritated, I wanted to be up at nine. 11am. Back to work.

Working backwards always complicates things. To get the floor to line up on one side of the stairs with the other side, I have to figure out how they should be cut and get them all cut and then assemble with crossed fingers. One small problem, our walls are not related to straight lines.

1pm. My floor is living up its name, it is floating right into the kitchen every time I try to lock the pieces together. Arghhh. I need weight and the entire neighborhood seems to be out right now.

2pm. On to the easy part. The long straight (ish) stretches with no cutting. I should be done before the family comes home. I am getting good at this, but I won't be quitting my regular job any time soon.

5:30pm. The good news - The family is home. The bad news - The floor is not quite done yet. I have a part of one row and the bay window left. Have I mentioned that I really, really don't like bay windows.

6:30pm. The floor is in. I get to hear all about the coastal adventures of three boys.

10pm. The boys are asleep. So turn on the air compressor and test how much noise small children can sleep through. Apparently it is a lot. Attach all that window trim I painted last week. Clean up mess.

12:07am. Go to bed. 12:47am. Still awake. Arghhh.

And that brings us to Monday. With the boys back in residence, work is once again at a snails pace. Fortunately, I have wonderful neighbors that like to borrow my children for a couple of hours. So, I can finally finish cutting and painting the bay window trim.

5:04pm. Shoot, soccer practice starts in 26 minutes. And we haven't even found all the soccer stuff yet. Uh-oh. 5:30pm. We made it to soccer.

7:30pm. Plant boys upstairs in front of the TV and start nailing up the baseboards.

10:30pm. Head meet pillow, pillow meet head. Good night.

Which brings us to today. And I just want a day off to catch up on laundry, read a book and recover. But this evening will most likely bring something that must be done. I really do love to remodel. Alone.