Wednesday, October 12, 2011

My Job Is Crazy Right Now

I work all of the time. It stinks. This will be short.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve torn out some carpeting, laid some more laminate floor covering, painted some things, put up some lights, installed some ceiling fans and entertained a visitor. And worked a lot.

Here’s a short photo essay of the floor project. Before, for reminding:

Master-Floor-01Master-Floor-02

Mid carpet removal (with fun dog stains):

Master-Floor-03

This is how much the previous owners’ dogs liked to dig:

Master-Floor-04

Once the chewed up padding was gone, trim and carpet tack removal began (and ended with a pile of trim):

Master-Floor-05

Aside - The fun part about this project was just throwing everything out of the window onto the ground. Carpets and padding crushed the crappy and dead bushes in the front of the house, and the trim/wood/nails went into the garbage can I dragged under the window. It’s really oddly satisfying to throw things out of a window. I recommend it. – Aside over.

After cleaning up, I discovered this. A terrible thing to read on something that you walk on all of the time (it says “Replace”):

Master-Floor-06

Undeterred, I moved onto the next step. Since the floor in the bedroom is really, super extra uneven, I had to improvise a shim system made from paint stir sticks pilfered from Home Depot:

Master-Floor-07

Not too bad. Once properly shimmed and semi-level, it was underlayment time:

Master-Floor-08

Underlayment down, I spent the next several hours interlocking engineers fake wood boards:

Master-Floor-09

Luckily, I wasn’t able to finish, as I ran out of boards. I needed maybe five more to be finished. Crap:

Master-Floor-10

The floor still looks like that, weeks later. I have purchased one more box of flooring, since I purchased it, I’ve been to a wedding one weekend and it’s rained the other weekend, not to mention that I work all of the time now. I hope to finish up this weekend, along with baseboard trim, but who knows?

Another weekend, my father-in-law came to visit us. Here’s what his room looked like when he came:

Mr-Stotzer-Bedroom-01Mr-Stotzer-Bedroom-02

It’s not quite all the way finished, but it was livable and is almost all the way finished.

More fun to come someday, but don’t count on it, as I’m working a lot. It should die down a bit after Monday, so I may be able to write more often, but again, no promises. The next big project is the kitchen remodel, but that might be a month or so away, as kitchens are expensive as all heck.