Missed It By That Much

I took the day off on Thursday and Friday to give my wife an anniversary present (our anniversary was Thursday). We have had a palette of laminate flooring sitting in our garage for three years.

My wife went to the local discount flooring store and bought an odd lot palette for $100. We ended up with about 250 ft2 of a deep cherry, about 100 ft2 of a light cherry and a whole bunch of light oak the appears to have been from a job that was started and the homeowner decided to go another direction. Most of the boards are out of the box and several of them have various cuts made to them but there's plenty to cover the 300 ft2 and have a bunch of unusable boards left over.

The plan was to clear the room, remove the carpet and lay the flooring in four days. Thursday was delegated to clearing out the living room and hallway. Friday involved removing the carpet. It had to be cut into pieces small enough to fit into 30 gallon trash bags purchased from the city (we're on one of those one big trash can deals and have to purchase bags they will pick up).

On Saturday we... Well... We were moving slowly on Saturday, took a lot of breaks and ran into difficulties. We're using the existing moulding but figured out that the door trim goes lower than the moulding in several places and the flooring won't fit under it.

We started out trying to make all of these weird cuts. It took up most of the 2.5 hours we were working in the hallway and looked terrible. We broke for dinner and ended up making another trip to Lowe's and buying a saw designed to make those sorts of cuts. And we started over Sunday morning. We had as much done in about an hour - including cutting the bottom of the door trims - as we did in the time the previous night.

We were on a roll but it wasn't meant to be. We finished the hall and got about 1/3 of the living room covered. We were slowed down by defective boards, closing gaps from walls out of square and drywall hung on an angle, and an idiot operating the saws (that would be me).

I figure we have another day to finish the flooring then another 1/2 day to get the trim taken care of. I don't have a great amount of flexibility for taking leave so I need to go to work in the morning. I will see if I can take Tuesday and possibly Wednesday off to complete this project.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Home