Very Good Intentions
We purchased new laminate flooring for the entire house and knew we could totally tackle installation and save a few bucks. At least it sounded logical at the time. This was four years ago.
I didn’t want seams through the doorways, which equated to strange, nightmare angles at each door. Each door is neither parallel nor perpendicular to any other door. Then, the trim around the doors was too close to the subfloor for the new floor to fit under. Do I take the trim off all the doors or try to cut the bottoms off using my still primitive set of tools? This was beginning to seem more complicated than expected.
With my partner’s usual 50-60 hour work week and 10 hours a week commute, it makes sense that I just had at it alone. Which, if you have ever done floors alone, is challenging, especially for a newbie. Measure, walk to wherever you’re making the cuts, walk back, install, rinse, and repeat. Over and over and over. This is not ideal, but certainly possible.
Where to Start?
2019 Kids first, right? Yeah, so I got the kids’ rooms done. I hated to see them playing on the Petri dish carpet. Not that they are not filthy themselves. But ugh, when your knees have red bumps after kneeling on the floor…something nasty is underfoot. Spruced up, painted, new furniture, and Phase One was complete. It was awesome!
Then Life.
It was a very tumultuous time. It was a time of rough waters, emotionally and financially. I was changing career directions, and we were making big life decisions. The floors went into the shed while we navigated the storms.
Then Covid.
2020 Well, we all know how that went. The only thing in our household that got locked down was the kids. Work was showing up rain or shine or pandemic for my partner. Or rather, he was showing up. And all of a sudden, I had my three elementary school kids, two with special needs, home. Everyone had some real shit go down during this time and was dealing with heavy rocks. I have nothing else to say about that in this post other than that we felt it, too. Nonetheless, the floors slept quietly in the shed. A rug remained over the seam between the old and new floor in the hall like a filthy old bandage floating in a pool. Totally gross.
In the meantime, I made labels to conserve the toilet paper worth its weight in gold, wet wipes, and a permanent switch from paper product snot rags to washable-in-bleach snot rags. It worked out so well that we still do it.
Memories…
2021: A whole lot more of all that and then some. It was a very tough year, if words can even be used for the magnitude of 2021 for us.
Just Start Moving Forward
2022 Sigh. Have you ever run a section of a life marathon, and it just keeps going? Aside from dealing with and attempting to heal from all the fallout of the last two years, we had high hopes. At last, we started Phase Two, the living room and hall.
This felt amazing to complete. We sat back and stared at it for days. It’s like moving into a new “New” place. Neither of us had ever lived anywhere brand new, so this was the closest to brand-new house heaven either of us had ever experienced. And quite frankly, it felt so good to make a fresh start and accomplish something that felt like progress.
Are we there yet?
2023 Finally, Phase Three. We ripped off that old bandage, one of my favorite parts. The Primary bedroom carpet was so grody.
What we don’t see when we are immersed in our daily lives amazes me. I knew it was terrible and that we couldn’t do anything about it without some planning, taking days off, and good weather. Goodness knows we can’t put the bed and clothes in the yard while it’s raining, ideally. But it was pretty revealing once we moved the furniture and started tearing it out.
We only sometimes see how unhealthy things have gotten under the surface once we dig in, don’t we? We keep going because we have to. Because ripping out the nasty is more complicated than it looks from the outside. It takes diverting the everyday flow and upheaval of what feels stable, even if the unhealthy has become stable. We live with unhealthy because removing it is complicated.
Once we decide we are tired of it and uncover it, we cannot believe we ignored the truth for so long. And as we peel it back, we hope there isn’t too much rot. Inevitably, we tend to find some.
Thank goodness for bleach. My nieces tell stories of coming home and smelling bleach. They always knew to stay out of their mother’s path, that she was in a whirlwind of bleaching the house and throwing out anything that didn’t make sense. In retrospect, I can see this was her way of cleaning “her house” during her version of a hard life. Sometimes, the only control we have at the time in our lives is to clean them with bleach.
As we are tearing it out, bleaching it, cursing it, we ask ourselves how in the hell we got to this point. How the hell did we let it go on for so long? But, the fact is, we stop seeing it past the first couple of stains. They are so noticeable at first, too. The spill on the white carpet is shocking and horrifying. We clean it up the best we can and move on. We certainly don’t change it out now; that would be unbelievable. Then, we get a few more stains. A pet we love used it as a toilet. A person we love came through our beautiful, clean space with filthy shoes as if they owned the place. Secretly, we knocked over the drink and tried to clean it up before anyone else noticed that we were capable of the same destruction. And it compounds. And we stop seeing it, and the infractions don’t seem like such a big deal. We don’t even see them anymore. They start to blend in with the rest, and we keep going.
But we know it’s there, don’t we? Under it all, we remember when it started and how it felt when the first stain occurred. And for so long, we wish we had the time to deal with it, but it would be complicated to deal with these rocks. So, they return to the bag, and we live with the nasty carpet.
And then it just cannot go on any longer. We know we need to tear out the nasty carpet once and for all.
Turns out I could do it.
Overwhelming as it seems at the moment, laying down one new board at a time eventually gets you a brand new floor. After removing the garbage, we clean what is underneath or paint over the stains that aren’t going anywhere.
It feels good to walk on a clean floor, drop my clothes on the floor, and not pick up millions of spores. Or walk barefoot without imagining what’s growing underfoot, and not in a good way. Plus, the floors look beautiful. We ended up purging while we were at it. The room looked and felt so good, emptied of all the clutter; we couldn’t imagine putting it all back. So, we didn’t.
I feel peace every time I walk into the room now and through the finished house with no seams in the doorways. A smile appears on my face because it feels so different, better, clean, and pretty. We dropped some big rocks with this one. Not only a massive project that has been looming for four years but the unveiling of what time had done to something that no longer belonged or healthily served our home—Bye-bye, nasty carpet, and welcome to the beautiful new floor.
