Diary of a Do-it-Yourselfer

The year preceeding 4 days ago: my carpet is gross. I am embarassed to have my and others' children rolling around on it. It has a hole in the middle of the living room/dining room. I have coveted the laminate floors of others for quite some time now.

The months before 4 days ago: Thanks our good ol' Prez I got my floors finally! Now, to get them in.

The week preceeding 4 days ago: All the materials are in the garage. We are slowly pulling up pieces of tack strip from under the carpet and then putting the carpet back down as I am not sure WHEN we will be putting the floors down AND I dont want to live on concrete indefinetely. Adrians folks are here this weekend, and we had wanted to take advantage of them by making them do work, but they got a stomach bug (I think it was on purpose, but dont tell em I said so).

4 days ago: We have all the tack strip pulled up, and have the concrete exposed in the dining room and in about half the living room. I figured we would work in sections so we dont have to move the furniture more than we needed to.

We have collected info from professional and experienced persons. We have read lots of tips and we are ready to lay the first board. Good thing we have a good idea of what we are supposed to do because the instructions in the flooring are nothing but 30, 1 inch x 1 inch pictures that are totally subjective in their meaning since they have no words. Here goes nothing.

An hour later: We have laid the first boards and this is gonna be tougher than we thought. It sure is taking a while to get each board in. I called Jared (lil' bro) to get his tips cause he and dad just put them in mom's new studio. We will try that and hope it goes better.

Another hour later: Going better, but it still seems like it is taking awhile to get these boards in. We are clicking the long side, and then tapping the short end in. It takes alot of strong hitting (I cant do it) and then the ends are a nightmare.

Day 2 of Install: We have been working for several hours and only have about 6 rows done. We also just ran into our first problem area ..the closet. We noted here that we didnt account for the edge of the door frame and our measurements are off. The very thought of having to pull up the floors and starting over is enough to make me cry, and Adrian not want to be my friend ever again.

After staring at the problem for another 2 hours we come up with a plan, make a weird template, buy a jig saw to make the cuts, get that piece in and take a break for church.

After church we started again. Things are moving along, but it sure takes aLOT of work. This is harder than I was expecting. Suddenly this room looks like a stadium and I am wondering if the carpet was as bad as I was remembering. I checked.

Yes, it was, so we keep going.

Day 3 (yesterday): Making progress, but had to buy another pull bar because we had beat ours so much it was bending.

I ask the chic at Lowes if she has any tips for me..she stares at me blankly. Okay, nevermind.

When Adrian gets home he uses the new pull bar to beat in an end. All the while he is muttering under his breath something about how he never thought the carpet was that bad to start with.

He leaves for school, and I try to beat a board in and again realize that I am unable to do this. This is furstrating to me. This should not be that hard.

So, I sit down with a determined expression and a stubborn streak a mile long. It took me about 2 minutes of focus to figure out that we have been doing this wrong for three days.

Upon making this realization, I check the picto-intructions ..and yep. Thats what they say. If I had only interpretted them correctly and could see microscopic arrows and numbers that told me to click in the short end, lay down, then lift up the whole row to a 45 degree angle and click in the long end. Who knew. Only the Japanese people who wrote the instructions.

We hadnt studyed the pictures too long, because we had been talked through the process several times (including by the salesmen who had put these in before) and felt we understood what we were supposed to do. Apparently this manufacturer does things alittle different.

ANYWAYS. I now realize that what was taking us 3-5 minutes per board ONLY should have taken us 30 seconds, if not less. AND, the pull bar and pounding werent even part of the deal.

SO. The room is looking smaller again, Adrian and I are back on speaking terms and we look forward to a better day in the am.

Day 4, today: I rearranged the furniture and removed the rest of the disgusting carpet because the possiblity of getting the floors in has once again become real. I feel stupid that we made the mistake, but we shall move on knowing that at least we didnt do the whole room before we figured it out.

I lay some boards across the room to do a quick check and discover that aforementioned measurement error is coming to once again bite us in the booty. I call Adrian at work, and we decide that it will be necessary to take the floors up and start over.

This is not as revolting as the thought seemed yesterday..so its okay.

I pulled up all the boards, careful to keep the rows together so that we know where all the cut pieces go. The children are threatened with their little lives and I go about trying to catch up on the laundry I have gotten so behind on the last few days.

I was gone doing that in the back of the house for about 20 minutes when I returned to find that Ty had stacked each board, one at a time on top of eachother to create a nice little tower in the middle of the living room.

When questioned (if you can call what I did questioning) he replies that he, "needed a table to eat (his) crackers."

Oh, and he reminded me, "Its okay, I got you some flowers."

Ah, well. All is forgiven then. AGHGHGHGHGHGH!



ANYWAYS - we are back to square one.

But. I think it will all go faster once we get started. AGAIN.

So, until next time... Pray for my marriage :)