Tuesday, October 14, 2008

The reason I feel 50 hundred years old today


Exhibit A: filthy, dirty carpet for which we paid to have Scotchguarded and the factory forgot to do (even water left stains).

Anyway it was time for it to come out since my son has spent approximately 2 years in here in a hospital bed through various surgeries, chemo, body casts - you know, the routine stuff. We've all spilled his food in here more than once, and Pediasure is murder on carpet.

Here is the wood that is going to replace the carpet. I'm looking forward to the easier maintenance. I found it interesting that our wood bundles are stamped with the names Dorothy and Pam.

Exhibit B: we had the original carpet glued down to prevent "wheelchair creep" and the installers took us quite literally about the glue-down part. In fact, they troweled it on. After about 30 minutes, this is all the progress we had made.

And another 30 minutes:

Finally, Mr O. struck upon the idea of cutting the carpet in strips and ripping it back, foot by foot. It still took stinkin' forever. This was about 10:30 pm (keep in mind we started at 5:30)


And here we are at 1:30 am - FINISHED. The floor was still extremely sticky - I mean pieces of wood were stuck to my feet, so we laid out carpet pieces to form a walkway back to the bedrooms. All that pulling nearly ripped my arms from their sockets, I feel like I did some major weight lifting. See that black stuff? It was all over the floor and the kids helped me pick it off - we no longer have any fingerprints (I suppose that means they have a future in jewel thievery)

Where the old meets new (wow is it ever loud listening to the nail gun even though we are down in the basement today).

The absolute best thing about the wood floor going in is the new flush-mount floor vents. Love them!

I guess I will eventually recover from 8 hours of HARD manual labor and the new floor will be worth it.

Stop back by on Friday to see the finished product. In the meantime, here's a fun, easy Halloween decoration. To see what others are talking about, stop by the Lazy Organizer