Grateful

I think it’s a sign of the times that you could see my holiday towel in the midst of this construction-like photo:

Home before we worked took out the rest of the vinyl flooring.

Regardless, after several days of walking between subfloor and our spiffy new hardwood laminate floor, I’m just so happy we were able to do anything at all.  It no longer feels so crazy to be in the midst of a project, and I’m finally able to enjoy the chaos that ensues.  We have had such great help and support in this renovation process.  And, in the downtime that we enjoyed over the holidays, we were still able to decorate for Christmas.  For dorks like me, that extra treat is part of what makes a place feel really homey.  So, we have a Christmas tree next to the powerdrill, and for now I like it that way.

Removing Road Blocks

You might have noticed that we haven’t posted anything here for a little while.  That’s because we hit a huge road block in our renovation plans.  Half of the wood laminate floor is down, but the other half needs to go from the front room into the kitchen.  And that’s where our problems began.

We learned some nasty secrets about the previous owners of this place.   In the kitchen they were lazy, and had covered old vinyl laminate with Pergo flooring.  Before we could put down our new, fancy, Montreal Gunstock flooring, we had to take up the old Pergo AND the really old vinyl laminate.  However, we were sad to find out that the vinyl was glued to another layer of plywood that was stapled into the subfloor.  What a mess.   I learned how to use a circular saw to coax out the biggest pieces from the middle of the floor.  I felt such victory seeing those hugs blocks of plywood and vinyl get removed.  And even though our entire kitchen was covered in a layer of sawdust for days, there was such accomplishment in that feat.

But we were left with the nook and cranny areas– places where the circular saw just couldn’t fit.  And, for days, we didn’t know what to do so we did nothing.

If you watch HGTV, you see contractors whip out magical tools and get seemingly impossible tasks done in 15 minutes.  With that logic, we went to Home Depot for a new, cooler tool that could gut out all of our floor woes.  There, we bought what seemed like the Holy Grail of home improvement tools:  the Dremel.    Last weekend we attempted to put our new super tool to use, and we were confident that– just like those HGTV masters– we would be finished with the floor in less than an hour.

We were wrong.  Really wrong.  One of the Dremel’s attachments fell off after only a few slices into the floor.  The other attachments left a smokey smell from burning into the plywood that was too strong for them.  And, we sanded down one cutting attachment to almost non-existence.  Even with all that, we couldn’t get to the nitty gritty parts of the floor that were really essential.  Another trip to the hardware store proved that there was not a fancy enough gadget to make the work disappear.  With that sad reality, Brant armed himself with an oddly shaped handsaw and sliced into the vinyl-plywood hell with all of his fury from weeks of frustrating flooring hold-ups.    Magically, within a half hour, all of those messy floor layers were gone.

Now, it’s time to cover the plywood with our own floor choice.  It probably won’t get done in time for Christmas, but it will be finished someday soon.  Our biggest hurdle yet has been surpassed.  And I’m glad we’re doing it the right way rather than be sloppy like the last homeowners.  Hopefully, someday the future owners of this place will be grateful.

Kicked to the curb

This week, I experienced something of an epiphany. It was one of those weird moments you have when an otherwise mundane, commonplace occurrence suddenly strikes you as the strangest, most bizarre thing to ever happen in the history of the world. I have become enamored with the miracle of municipal refuse collection.

See, we missed our trash day last week, so this week we had twice as much trash as usual. Plus we had some leftover carpet remnants, a 25-year old sump pump, and an old toilet we replaced over the weekend. There was a lot of trash. But to get rid of it, all I had to do was carry it out to the side of the road. The next morning, the city sent a couple of guys in a big truck to my house to collect my garbage and take it away for me.

And when I got home from work, everything was gone. Everything! And I didn’t have to lug my trash out to a dumpster or a common area, much less haul it to the county landfill. They came to me to get my junk. Is it worth paying taxes for this service? Hell yes.

I think it illustrates the high value we Americans place on having things clean. And not just clean, but spotless. It also illustrates how the ownership of private property is paramount in this country, so much so that Rumpke visits each individual house to collect the people’s trash. We don’t take our trash to the city. The city comes to us. What a bizarre, remarkable inversion of what you might normally expect from government.

Anyway. Being a homeowner continues to surprise me in weird and unexpected ways.