So, the weekend:
Friday:
I had commited to running a Pulp Adventure Serial at the annual charity-drive gaming convention. It was fun. I’m a little fuzzy on what Jackie and Justin did that night, but since I got back from the Con about 1:30 am, I certainly had no chance at all to participate in it.
Saturday:
AKA “the day the pain began”; Jackie purchased some bookshelves from a local store that’s going out of business — slowly, our plan to turn one end of the huge basement family room into a sort of ‘reading nook’ is coming into focus, one cheap piece of hand-me-down furniture at a time :P.
The real problem with this shelving plan: before anything permanent goes down, there’s at least a three-foot wide strip of carpet has to come up. (The cats ruined the carpet in a very permanent and miasmatic fashion over the course of months. I’ll let you figure out the details; the baseboards were ruined as well, if that puts it in perspective). We cut the strip out, but finally decided we should just take all the carpet out at that end of the room — really make that end a different ‘room’.
We dropped Justin off at the Consortium for some community service and went down to Home depot to pick out some flooring before we cut out the carpet.
After a brief search, we found the perfect thing: really nice looking parquet flooring that would be exactly the sort of thing for a restful reading-nook type of experience. Even in our budget for this project! Except that the glue used to affix it to the floor isn’t rated for basement use and putting it down there voids the warranty and pretty much makes all the Home Depot people roll their eyes and point and laugh at your stooopeedity.
Right, so we settled on stuff that would work down there, which (barring carpet that would simply repeat the mistakes of the past or the pergo flooring that was far outside our budget) meant linoleum.
Now… I hate linoleum. Hate. In a kitchen, fine. Whatever. In a bathroom… well, there’s a certain logic to it. In a 12x20 foot space… hate. We bought the most pattern-free, neutral stuff we could find and tried not to stare longingly at the parquet flooring across the aisle anymore.
Picking that up and getting it home without creasing it chewed up most of our morning and early afternoon. Later afternoon was spent at the Consortium (where Justin was digging holes for Dave in soil that is apparently the direct chemical opposite of the stuff around our house — in other words, good for roses, bad for maple trees — conversely, we can’t keep a rose bush alive to save our lives, but the extra maple tree of Dave’s that we traded for last year, planted, and then promptly did nothing special at all to care for has taken off beautifully).
Right. Fun was had, except for Justin getting busted for yet-another-coverup-for-something-that-didn’t-otherwise-bear-mentioning. Grr. I’d ask the heavens “When will the Boy learn?”, except I’m afraid of the answer.
Anyway. That was Saturday.
Sunday:
Dawned bright and early and I was off to the Convention to run the Pulp thing again. Another good time, and I was back at the house by 2pm. Jackie and Justin had not been idle: the lawn was mowed, anti-weed fertilizer was distributed all around the back yard (which sorely needed it), and the carpet section we were getting rid of was rolled up and outside, waiting for the trash guys to pick it up on Monday. (Hope they have gas masks. Phew.)
Right. Time to do this linoleum thing. Suppress shudders of dismay and get to work.
Things went relatively rapidly, which is to say that by starting at 2pm, we’d finished up the back-breaking, knee-busting, muscle-torturing process by 8pm (aided in no small part by ***Dave, who ran down to Home Depot and delivered us more glue when we realized that we’d foolishly believed the ‘area covered’ information on the side of the glue container and not gotten enough.
(The irony that linoleum glue works in the basement and parquet flooring glue doesn’t has not escaped me.)
Anyway, the “durable flooring tile substitute” is down. It looks about as good as linoleum can, which is to say I still hate it, but at least it’s down and the room smells faintly of glue rather than strongly of ammonia. I go downstairs periodically and walk around in an effort to become acclimated. It’s not really working.
We’re not remotely done: we need to put one of those strips down to terminate the carpet/linoleum border, rearrange the baseboards, paint the walls in pretty much the whole damn basement (at least partly because it really needs it, but also because we now need a color that ties the carpet and ‘tile’ together), assemble the first bookshelf and make plans for creating the second by copying the first, and of course pick out an area rug that will (hopefully) cover 80% of the linoleum flooring. My arms and legs hurt very much today, but we are undaunted (we can’t be daunted — you can’t get to half the house right now, from all the crap we’ve got piled up in the family room, and people are coming over this weekend).
This is how all our major projects start — if we’d known beforehand how much the front lawn work would suck, we’d have never started it.
It should be some indication of how much this has sucked that even Jackie has suggested putting the cats up for adoption if they screw up any more of the house.
I guess we’re just dog people.
