You'd think that my body might decide to cooperate, given the large amount of work ahead. Instead, I woke nice and early. This is the Day2 recap (posted the next morning as I had no finger energy left to type last night):
5:30 - Wake up, take drugs for stuffy head. Lay in bed and try to get some rest.
6:30 - Start of the morning routine, Little Trooper woke up and was not to be deterred from breakfast.
8:00 - After the family is completely up and breakfasts are completed, send everyone else but me to the basement. There's plywood yet to place.
9:15 - First row is down. 2nd row is going to either end at the closet or need to be cut to go in. Decide with my wife that we need to do the coat closet. Fun, more ripping and staples. (Just cant' get enough of those staples.)
9:40 - 2 Birthday calls and lots of Tetris with plywood, the closet is now ready.
10:46 - Plywood underlayment is now complete. House and garage are vacuumed to remove as much sawdust as possible. Bring up compound miter saw and prep work areas to start laying laminate in earnest. Rest of the family heads to swimming classes.
11:30 - Oh yeah, need to do more undercutting of the door frames. It's not fun to run a hacksaw as close as possible to the floor and my hands have a lot less skin on the knuckles.
12:30 - Family is back from swimming with lunch. Break for lunch and settling the kids down for a nap.
1:30 - Back at it. Cringe at how slow things seem to be going. Spacers are pivoting under the drywall (most of which stops about 1/2 inch short of the floor) and the previously laid rows are bowing against the large open doorways between rooms. Curse at myself for agreeing to start on what isn't a very solid continuous wall. The results had best be better than starting against the outside wall of the house. My wife is able to assist while Little Trooper is napping and the princess is watching Dora/Max & Ruby episodes in the basement.
5:00 - Stop, discuss dinner, break for dinner.
6:50 - Return from dinner, banish everyone to the basement again while I continue work on the floor. (Did I mention my wife is doing an extraordinarily good job dealing with all the noise and constant kid needs while I'm banging around and she's still fighting off a bad headache? Kudos.)
7:30 - Did you know it can take nearly 1/2 hour to size/cut/re-size/re-cut just one board? Yeah, an ugly cut that has a 1 inch strip that runs 23 inches until it spreads back out to full width. And that has to go into a space where I'm pushing the board in next to a wall. Ugh.
8:20 - Need a break. Little Trooper went down for bed on the early side. That was good as he will sleep through the noise. Go down to watch part of a show with my daughter and take a rest.
9:00 - Oops, long rest. She's going up with my wife to get ready for bed, I'm going to try to work some more.
9:30 - Done for the night. We're at a break in the room where the next row must extend into the kitchen and under where the refrigerator is now. That will wait until after breakfast tomorrow. Clean up work areas, put tools out-of-reach of kids.
10:30 - My wife poured me a bath in our indulgence tub. Bless her soul, she's still making sure I have some time to relax on my birthday.
Summary:
4 boxes of laminate used, about 6' x 18' of floor covered. Gee, that only leaves 12' x 36' now that we're to the long runs!
About 300 brad nails to hold plywood in place (not even worrying about the centers of most boards).
No comments:
Post a Comment