Well, I've been working my fannie off on that floor. I thought it would be just a matter of ripping up the carpeting and putting down the flooring. Of course, it isn't so simple. There's some kind of black foam double-sided sticky pad thing under the carpet. Under that is this sheet flooring stuff that was put in whenever the extension to the house was done (50's? 60's?). The extension includes the dining room and the mud room.
I decided to take up the floor one room at a time, starting with the dining room. I peeled the carpet off without much trouble, and thought I'd just scrape the foam pad off and lay the new floor over the old sheeting. Not gonna happen. Even if I COULD get that foam stuff off cleanly, it would take months. I ain't got months. Plus the undersheeting stuff was cracking and peeling and stained anyway, so I decided to just rip it all up. I FINALLY finished that part of the job this morning. So one floor is back down to sheetrock or whatever you use for floors that looks like sheetrock. Woo! My knuckles are totally slashed, but I feel good at this progress. Next I have to do the same thing in the kitchen.
The stove and fridge are still in the kitchen, so I think I'm going to peel the carpet BACK, and take up the underflooring a section at a time, rather than rip out all of the carpet. That way the big appliances can stay in place until the very end. Once that floor is out, I'm hoping it's just a matter of sealing the joint between the 2 rooms, cutting the new sheet flooring to size, rolling it out and sticking it down. *fingers crossed*. I had hoped to have this whole project finished by now, but that's just not how things worked out. I'd rather do it right than do it fast. And with The Belly getting ever-more-cumbersome, I can only go so fast.
Other stuff has happened, but it's not that important. I might get back to regular journaling someday, but not now. :)
I bought a floor!!! Yesterday I drove into Spokane and visited one of their Lowe's Home Improvement Stores. We had been given some gift certificates for Christmas by Mike's parents and I finally got around to doing the buying. (In fairness to myself, you're not supposed to lay vinyl flooring in the cold, so it would've been pointless to buy it before the weather turned more consistently nice.) I did the figuring and for the dining room and kitchen, we need 25 feet (they come in 12' rolls). With adhesive, seam sealant, it came out to only $20 more than what the gift certificates were for! Woo! After the floor gets put down, I'll need to get some molding for the edges, but that's not very expensive, and I can buy it in Colfax instead of making another all-day trip to Spokane.
The pattern I got is made of one-foot squares. Imagine the square divided into fourths laterally, then a diamond super-imposed over the middle intersection. The color is kind of a warm brown, with the "grout" a sort of a dark-gray color. Mike says the floor looks like rock, but I don't see that. Anyway, so begins the long process of "preparing the floor". As a practical matter, this means cleaning house. I've already picked up the living room and put toys away in there. I need to vacuum that floor, so that I can move on to the next phase - moving things off of the floor to be replaced. This will be a somewhat longish project, since there is lots of stuff to move, and pregnancy forces me to work in bursts rather than everything at once (my usual style). So, I've been doing dishes and picking up. Once everything is clean, but before I start moving stuff around, I'll take and post some "before" pictures, then post pictures as the project progresses. I don't know about the rest of you, but it will be fun for me to look back on this project later and see the improvement.
While I was in town, I did a little bit of shopping. I got myself some maternity clothes from the Motherhood store at the mall, and I got Adam three T-shirts, as he's a bit low in that department. I got Kayla a shorts-and-sleeveless-shirt outfit that may end up being what we bring her home in. I got Mike a new non-stick pot, as the one we've been using has lots its non-stickiness.
Thursday was chore day, and it was pretty much as usual. Monday was the meeting of the Needlers, and we decided on border sizes for the raffle quilt and learned how to make the blocks. Then I figured out how much of the fabric we had bought (10 yards) we'd need to make the blocks (4 1/2 yards). A quick stop at the grocery store for milk (we go through about two gallons a week now) and it was back home. Sunday was, of course, Easter, and Adam got a little candy, a couple of toys, and had a ten-minute Easter egg hung with the eggs he helped me color on Saturday.