My very first hardwood floor (part last)

Interesting thing about breaking up a six-month old renovation story into three parts, and then spreading it across a three-month span: you kinda forget where you were going with it in the first place.

In the first part of our little saga, I went into (excruciating) detail about how we bought the hardwood flooring for downstairs and then bought more flooring for downstairs and decided to use the first batch upstairs. In the second part, I started explaining how we took the popcorn off the ceiling and (somehow) went off on a tangent to show a few pictures of the reorganized garage, and then got back on track long enough to post a picture of my new flooring tool before pausing the story so I could throw in another episode of This Week in Mayonnaise.

So here we are, all gathered for part three (finally!), and I have absolutely no recollection of what it is I was planning to say in this post. Huh. Maybe if I just start typing, the muses will visit me with inspiration. Worked for Hesiod, didn't it? Except he was sort of more a chiseler than a typist, if you know what I mean.

I'm getting off track again, aren't I?

Right, so. We had leveled the floor as best we could, borrowed Mr. Awesome's compressor, bought a cheap but perfectly serviceable flooring stapler, and we were ready to go. Somehow, and I seriously have no idea how, I completely failed to take a single picture of the flooring in progress. Not one.

I guess that's sort of a testament to how straight-forward the whole job was, really. It got kinda repetitive, but then I got into the tricky bits around the closet, which got interesting, and then ... well, it was done. Didn't even really take me that long, if I remember correctly. Maybe about 24 hours total work? I think I rented the nail gun for about 12 hours, anyway. (Couldn't use the flooring stapler on the first row, or the rows nearest and inside the closet.)

We added baseboard and trim, filled and painted the holes, painted the closet doors (that was fun - not!), and we were done. Pretty easy, I have to say. The hardest part was the fact that the saws were all down in the sunroom at the time, and every time I had to cut a piece to start or finish a row, I had to measure the piece, take it downstairs, cut it, take it back upstairs and put it in. Still, nothing too out of the ordinary. I even hesitate to say it, but really, I didn't mind doing the flooring. Beats drywall, any day of the week.

In fact, I don't even have a picture of the finished room. I'll have to go take one specifically for this post...

Okay, so here's the deal: the bedroom's a bit of a mess right now. We got a new bed frame, but we couldn't get the mattress we wanted, so the old queen mattress is balanced precariously on the new king frame and, well, it looks bad. Also, we still haven't hung up any of our artwork in there or anything, so for now, no full on shots of the finished room. I do have a couple of the floor, however, so you can see how it looks with the baseboard, trim, and paint.





Pretty snazzy, eh? (Please ignore the huge tufts of cat fur - it's a never-ending issue.) I promise, REALLY promise, that I will post some shots of the finished room once we get the new mattress in, the artwork hung up, and the stupid pull thingy on the drapes fixed. Promise.

So, yeah... sorry the final part of this saga turned out to be such a let down. To make it up to you, how about a very special edition of everyone's favorite feature,

This Week In Mayonnaise

This week, not one, but TWO new uses for mayonnaise never before seen!

First up, we have the issue of the side gate. Now, as a deer deterrent, this thing has always been pretty much useless:



Even if we could remember to keep the side gate closed on a regular basis, the deer just jump the low hedge beside the gate and continue their merry plant-munching way into the back yard. Still, we didn't really have any immediate plans to replace it with something better.

Heh, silly us.

The War Department happened to be poking around over there the other day and noticed that the whole gate was leaning precariously in toward the back yard. Whether a deer nudged it over or the fact that only about twelve inches of each post was actually underground had finally caught up with it, the gate had lost any sort of structural integrity it may have had. Of course, she called me over to take a look at it, and it wasn't long before my usual inclinations took hold (DESTROY!)and the entire thing was lying on the grass beside the hedge. Oh, gee, something else that's broken. What a surprise.

On closer inspection however, we noticed a familiar substance caked on at the top of one of the uprights:



"Huh," I said to the War Department. "Well, THERE'S your problem!"

And finally, for this special edition of This Week In Mayonnaise, I need to take you, dear readers, all the way back to only our second week in the house. Boxing Day, in fact, when the War Department took it upon herself to start scoping out some of the electrical boxes and switches. She was working industriously in the sunroom, having shaken her head in wonder at the dog's breakfast that constituted the two outlets on the outside wall, and was about to head in to continue her inspection in the family room when something caught her eye.

A square of wallpaper was glued crookedly over a bulge in the wall on the side of the sunroom, at about the right height for an electrical outlet. She warily peeled back the paper and discovered a blank face plate for an electrical box.

Acting on a sudden suspicion, she looked outside, at the other side of the sunroom wall. Sure enough, there was the tale-tell sign of a piece of repurposed sprinkler pipe jutting out from the wall and disappearing into the ground outside. Sighing, she sat down next to the outlet and removed the faceplate, expecting to have to disconnect yet another badly wired connection.

Instead, she hit the motherlode:



Oh yeah. Solid mayonnaise, baby. Makes your arteries harden just thinking about it, don't it?