Crouching Ardvaark, Hidden Wombat

Hey folks. I know it's been awhile.  We've been on vacation, and I am finishing up a course at our local community college...time is precious.  So I won't waste your time either.

We received the bamboo flooring from Lumber Liquidators the weekend  before Labour Day, and we journeyed all the way out to Chantilly to get it..packed a lunch and everything!  It's  really close in color to the red oak floors we have. 

M was absolutely convinced that we could do it ourselves, and I sort of believed him.  We lacked mitre saw and a table saw, and the know-how and what not, but that wasn't going to stop us from trying.  Actually we'd bought the mitre saw for  the base of the wall unit so we had one of those, the table saw was purchased last Friday night on a desperate foray to Home Depot...another Ryobi product...only $114, and I still have all my digits, so it must be ok.

Saturday it took us all day long to get the area prepped and ready to go for the install.  I had to dissasemble all the A/V stuff down there and keep it safe until we were done.  M and I had to clean, and move all the furniture and boxes out of there except the sectional, which would have been a screaming horror to move.

After we actually started we did have to make one final trip to Home Depot to buy a $12 rubber mallet, which we forgot we needed until we'd started...at 4pm on Saturday.

Below is the lovely green and black laminate flooring which is probably the original 1955 floor finish.  Yecch.  The previous home owner had covered it with a carpet remnant and it was passably ok to look at if you didn't look closely.

The blue stuff is called Quiet Step, its' made from 'recycled materials' (prolly old Pampers and used Kleenex!), it's about a 1/3 of an inch thick and a bitch to  unroll and cut (a working box cutter would have helped but we didn't want to make another trip to Home Depot).

Here's the first box of planks, the rubber mallet really made things cruise.

I think this is around box 4.  We were really getting the hang of it.

The area behind the pantry/closet area were tricky.  It all ended up looking ok, and it's behind a door, no one will look too closely.

Around box 6 or 7 we had to move the first part of the sectional to the other side.

This was about box 8 or so.  It was 8:30pm.  We broke for dinner, and had two tough steaks and a baked potato each.  All that chewing revived us. 

After dinner we had to move the other sectional to the done side of the room.  Our friend Bobby and Marti Brom (along with son Carson and friend, Colonel Tim) dropped by and offered Apple Crisp and lots of encouraging words. 

Nearly done here, it was about 10pm, at this point. 

Cutting to Chase.  We finished at midnight.  M was concerned that the saws were making too much noise, and we were pretty much toast.  All that lifting,  crouching, sawing, hammering, etc, had this 47 year old carcass a'hurtin.

This bit won't show, because it will be behind the TV, but it still looks good!

Cut to Sunday afternoon.  We get it all back together, mostly.  M used a co-workers' shop vac and went over every inch of the couch.  I put our A/V system back together, and [sniff] put our 46" Samsung LCD HGTV back in it's rightful place.  The rug is a family piece that is on loan to us for the last few years from M's brother in law, I have always liked it, but I think it goes down here fairly well.

The next BIG project is painting, we're going to bring some of the colors upstairs, downstairs, and try to jazz it up in here.

Thoughts?

S'all for now.

cc