THE LAUGH IS ON US (or) ATTACK OF THE VINYL GUY

Not much happening around my blog this week, eh? Here’s why. Here’s what we did on Sunday night (DH did most of the moving, don’t worry. I more act in a ‘supervisory’ capacity these days).

As you can see, the refrigerator is in the living room (albeit, plugged in). So is our stove. No biggie, right? After all, the flooring will only take one day to install so that’s one days worth of take out and we’re ready to go. One day was how long it took to do the carpet…

HA! The nice vinyl flooring guy got here on Monday. By about 3:00 PM when DH called for a progress report I said, a little hesitantly, that I didn’t think the floor would be finished on Monday. Maybe Tuesday? DH got home and spoke to the installer (I was happily – and blissfully ignorant – camped out on the basement floor on my Thermarest camp mattress (we don’t have a bed or a couch down here) for my afternoon nap). When DH came down to nudge me, he says,

"Did you ask the installer how long it will take him to install the floor?"
"No." Came my muffled reply from the basement floor.
"He figures it’s going to take him four days!" DH says a little incredulously. I started to laugh and laugh! This type of disaster is so typical of us! The installer even said to DH that the flooring companies never write on the invoice how long the installation is going to take. We now know to ask next time!

Note: we were to have our first real estate meeting on Thursday evening. You know, the kind of meeting where you walk through your sparkling house, admiring the gorgeously decorated spaces while enjoying a cup of tea and the views of a nice green lawn without spring apples in the backyard. I refer you back to photograph number one. This is what our living room will look like at 5:00 PM, Thursday evening (Newfoundlanders call anytime after noon ‘evening’). The meeting was set for 7:00 PM Thursday evening.

Our meeting is now changed to next week giving me the weekend and, Lord knows, whatever other time I need to clean up the main floor. Did I mention that the weather was so bad for the past two days that the installer had to do all of his sub-floor cutting inside and that sub-floor for vinyl flooring needs to have the seams sanded down? You wouldn’t believe the dust. The worst thing is, my mother-in-law has me under strict orders not to be washing any walls (another Newfoundland spring ritual)…she didn’t mention dusting them though…

In the meantime, seeing as we can’t work on the main floor, we have concentrated on other areas of the house. The basement has only 4 boxes left for DH to look through and sort and then we’ll have officially gone through all of the containers in our storage area and organised/gutted them. I’m so proud of us! Not so the garage but, that’s another story perhaps worthy of blogging about.

Another project DH has been working on is our master bedroom (it was yet another item on the 'things we must do before selling the house' list). Since we purchased this house in 2002, we renovated two of the bedrooms and put down laminate flooring (the same type and dye lot as is in the basement). We also purchased enough to put in the master bedroom and here are the results:

Before (unlike Yarn Harlot, I did not clean up our room before taking these pictures. I didn’t get a chance to capture the big mess before DH had the furniture moved out. I figured saving images of our untidiness for posterity only serves to add to the overall impact at the end of the job (assuming the ‘after’ pictures include a neat room, of course). Note the 20 year old carpet:

During:

And, after!

These were taken just a few minutes ago, the cats are just checking out the new space. The duvet cover may need to be changed – I might get a chance to get out next week and look for a new one – and one of the wall pictures (another plate) is in the living room so that’s not up yet. There’s just no way this body can fit into the living room right now.

Regardless of a few touch ups (the need to re-paint and re-install the closet doors, new electrical plate covers and some telephone wiring) we think it looks pretty darn good!

Off to a pre-natal appointment…