laying it down

There are two reasons I haven’t posted since the bathroom was finished. One, I finally succumbed to the black plague that’s going around and have been busy producing antibodies; and two, I have been too frustrated with the lack of progress since the bathroom’s been finished to post anything that wasn’t nauseatingly whiny.

I haven’t been going over to the house because Joe and his dad have been prepping the floors for hardwood installation and don’t need me (they say). Anyway, that’s what they tell me they’re doing, but I don’t know how prepping can take multiple weekends. I mean, we started pouring floor leveler in August.

So when Joe called me the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to proudly proclaim that they finished the floors, I was ecstatic. “You started laying down wood?” I asked. “No, we leveled the floors,” he said. I cannot reproduce any more of our conversation as this is a family-friendly blog, but Joe and his dad ended up staying another three hours and when we got there this morning, we were ready to install hardwood.
The first rule was that we had to do this barefoot because the floors need to be spotless, so no tracking dirt and crap in. The second rule is that before we could put wood down, we had to tape down the foam underlayment, which is a moisture barrier. This involves measuring, which instantly puts me into a coma.

So while Joe and his dad did calculations and other engineering stuff, I did my first load of wash. It came out perfect. I have high praise for the Samsung and its energy-efficient front loading. When we finally got to laying wood down, the guys realized they forgot the saw, so we didn’t get too far.