Hardwood floors are hard

Weew its been a crazy couple of weeks! Glenn and I enjoyed our long 3 day weekend just catching our breath after the whirlwind of activity since we closed on the house. Even though we're both still having trouble remembering to drive to the house and NOT the apartment, it's already feeling more like home than our previous apartments :-)

So since the last post.. after we had the carpets removed we began the leveling process. That was tricky involving lots of roofing felt and "high-tech" analysis with a long straight edge. Luckily, I had my husband, the expert leveler around to do the job.

Humm this is definitely taking longer than the ripping-out-carpet part...

Then we brought in friends to help with putting down the bamboo. This went pretty well and only took the majority of 2 days...

Looking good!

Awww so pretty! (Other 2 rooms not shown but just as pretty)

So that was that. Well not really. We ended up taking half the boards back up the following weekend to recut them around the door molding (with help from my parents who came into town to help us settle thinking that we had already completed the floors. Ha, tricked um!) due to some oversight on our part the first time around. And we've had to redo the quarter round twice, redo the caulking job, and repaint the molding. But you know, it was all part of the plan! Here we are 3 weekends later and we're almost done (with that).

Thanks everyone for all of your help with this. We'd have many many many more weeks left of working to get this done otherwise!

Logistics

An interesting wrinkle to our floor-purchasing adventures on Sunday was the fact that we do not own a truck or SUV. There quite simply was no way we could possibly transport 22 six-foot-long boxes of flooring materials in either of our small sedans. And since this was a clearance sale, we had to get our purchase off the lot by 6 PM that day - Lumber Liquidators was not willing to hold it for later pickup. 

Fortunately, our friend John offered very kindly to let us borrow his Toyota Tundra pickup on short (i.e., no) notice. Unfortunately, he needed it back by 6:30 PM that evening, so we needed to hurry, as it was already after 3:30 by this point!

While both vehicles are Toyotas, it turns out there's a world of difference between driving my Corolla and John's Tundra. I could feel my testosterone levels rising the moment I hoisted myself up into the drivers seat and sat behind the wheel of the truck. Before long I found myself grunting a lot and saying things like "I will crush you, puny Nissan!"... but that's another story. Still, I had no doubt that my newly elevated manliness was making me irresistible to Heather.

We got home with a truck full of flooring at about 5:20, which by our calculations meant that we had about 20 minutes to unload all 22 boxes, carry them up the flight of stairs to our apartment, and stash them somewhere where they wouldn't be too much in the way for the next month and a half. 

One of the many amazing things about Heather is how freaking capable she is. Not only did she quickly identify a number of out-of-the-way places to stash the boxes, but she unloaded at least half of the boxes herself, including carrying each one up a flight of stairs singlehandedly in 90°+ weather. I had to work hard just to keep up with her!

In the end, we got all of the boxes unloaded in about 25 minutes and made it back to Garner to return the truck with a few minutes to spare - success!

Weekend adventures and insights

The wealth of information available on the Internet is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it is possible to learn about nearly any topic online. On the other hand, if the topic is a subjective one (such as, hypothetically speaking, "Does bamboo make a good flooring material that holds up well to daily traffic and the antics of wild schnauzers?"), one can spend hours studying the topic, reading opinion after opinion after opinion, and come away with nothing more than a headache and an increased sense of uncertainty. And on the gripping hand, for such subjective topics, it seems to be inevitable that whatever opinion one begins the search with, 80% of the content thus encountered will tend to express the opposite opinion. (Again, just as a hypothetical example, if one begins the search believing that bamboo is in fact a good flooring material, the vast majority of search results will express that bamboo is crap that scratches if you so much as look at it sideways and will make you rue the day you ever installed it...)

This is especially problematic for me, as I have an unfortunate tendency to believe that the Internet Google can answer any question (even truly subjective ones) if only I can manage to specify the correct set of keywords. Thus it is that I have spent about 10 hours over the last three days researching the topic of flooring materials (primarily cork and bamboo, but also laminate, hardwood, etc.), resulting only in the aforementioned headache and uncertainty. 

To try and actually make some real progress on this issue, we set out on Saturday to visit some of the floor stores in the area. And by fortunate coincidence, this weekend turned out to be the annual clearance sale at Lumber Liquidators. They happened to have both cork (a pretty pattern with reddish grains) and bamboo (like this) on clearance for less than $2 per square foot. We liked the appearance and the quantity of both floors. However, since this was a clearance sale, the floors were only available until Sunday (i.e., one day after we first visited the store.)

Now, if you know me and Heather, you know that we don't like to be hurried into making decisions. You probably also know that when rushed, our most common decision is to not make a decision - that is, to simply wait until the decision is made for us by timing-related factors beyond our control. So by default, we would almost certainly choose between the two floors by not choosing at all, and end up with neither floor when the sale ended. Easy, right?

Well, if you know us, you also know that we don't like to think of ourselves as being predictable, and we both can be a bit contrary. When we realized what we would probably end up doing, we realized that simply wouldn't do. Thus, at 3:30 Sunday afternoon, we were back at Lumber Liquidators, picking out the floor that we would buy. 

So now we have 680 square feet (22 boxes) of bamboo flooring stashed in every nook and cranny of our apartment. It may be a little crowded around here for the next month and a half, but we made a decision, and now we'll have nice looking floors in our new house - or will we? Maybe I should Google that...