Unfocused!: Thursday's Thoughts

Let’s see, what happened since my last Thursday’s Post. I did not post one last Thursday because there was not much to say.

By the way, my husband, Dan, posted about the demo with pictures two weeks ago. I believe I neglected to tell y’all. Here is the post. You will find a picture of me hard at work with a jackhammer removing thinset.

On the weekend of July 14th and 15th:

We met my niece and her friend at EZ Restaurant located at the Alamo Quarry Market. I really enjoyed the visit with them both. The restaurant is wonderful with absolutely delicious food. We plan to go there every time we go to the Quarry.

Since we were at the Alamo Quarry Market, we did a little shopping at Amy’s Hallmark which was perfect timing because it was the first day of the Keepsake Ornament premiere. We collect the Lionel Train Series. And yes, I do believe we have all the trains pictured at the link.

We also shopped at Whole Food Market – my favorite place to shop for a few grocery staples. I discovered the 365 brand of cookies that tastes just like Oreos! I think Dan was in heaven because he had not had any for eons. It’s his favorite cookie. Note: I do not buy Oreos due to the HFCS (also known as “corn sugar”) content. I do not need the temptation of Oreos lying around. But these 365 cookies, they are an acceptable compromise!

We only had Sunday (July 15th) to work on the house. I vacuumed up most of the dust and bits of tile from the den and hallway while Dan ripped up the carpet and baseboard in the Master Bedroom. We then filled up the few gouges made from our lack of experience with the jackhammer.

Filled Gouges Drying

{Do you see eyes and hands or mittens? I did. Yes, I know. I am weird.}

{P.S. This is actually in a bedroom where we discovered gouges underneath the carpet.}
For the life of me, I cannot remember what events occurred during the week after the weekend of July 14th. I do know that I struggled with depression. When I get into this sad state of affairs, I often neglect things and cannot remember events unless I write them down. I have not been writing down stuff like I should in eons. I really should start doing this again.

Anyway, on the weekend of July 22nd and 23rd:

I finished vacuuming up the dust Saturday morning in the bedrooms. I did not want to be tracking all that stuff onto the flooring underlayment and the flooring themselves. Dan helped me with the kitchen after he was done doing whatever he was doing. The dust (from destroying tile and thinset and pulling up carpet) is evil and insidious getting in every nook and cranny.

We laid down the flooring underlayment in the den. It was slow going; but, we got most of it done. By the way, we have pictures of the process; but, they really belong to Dan. You will have to keep an eye on Dan’s blog for those pictures.

We started putting down the flooring. Let me tell you, the beginning is always the slowest part of this job. Once the flooring was established, the process went quicker.

Here I am taking a break

A word of advice: If you do flooring yourself and want the process to go real fast, pick out flooring that has the same length. The flooring we chose has varying lengths; so, the process of laying them down goes a little more slowly due to a variety of factors including avoiding joints of the floor boards from lining up.

Dan did not have the proper tools to fussy cut the floor boards with, which kind of sort of slowed us down. Shhhh, do not tell him I said this. Ha! Actually, he reads this blog. So, he is going to find out and will probably give me a light whack. I think it will be worth it because it is the truth. Ha!

Dan the man working out what to cut where

When we finished up on Sunday night, we were just under halfway done in the den. We have so much more to do! It is going to take longer than we estimated to get the flooring done. But, that is okay, we are most likely still saving money by doing it ourselves instead of having someone do it for us. Dan figured out that it would cost a minimum of $3,000.00 to get it all put down. Yikes! And then, you also have the pride factor of doing it all yourselves.

Dan ended up with sore knees. He actually bought some knee pads Saturday evening. I already had some knee pads for doing basting (quilting) work on the floor which is hard on your knees. They do really save your knees and are wonderful items to have on hand.

I did end up with sores on the back of my knees from the straps of the knee pads. They hurt really bad and I could not see them very well. Dan said they looked like sunburned or chaffed skin. I woke up Sunday night with a stinging type of pain. On Monday evening, I had Dan take a picture of the one on my right knee (which was the worst one) simply because I was dying to see what they were really looked like.

I was surprised to see that they were not as bad as they felt. This made me feel better about the sores. In the meantime, I have been racking my brain trying to come up with some kind of "knee sock" to protect our skin from the straps as I really do not want to wear jeans. No solution yet!

We had an A/C guy come out Tuesday morning (July 24th). Sometime Sunday, the A/C shut off and it got really hot! I commented to Dan that I was getting very hot. I did not understand it and was feeling sick from the heat. Dan discovered it was 84 degrees! Yikes! And, the A/C was not running. For a while, we could not figure it out. Dan called an A/C company and left a message. And then, I noticed something flashing on the thermostat. It turned out the batteries were dead. We replaced the batteries and the A/C kicked on approximately 5 or 10 minutes later. We talked and decided to have the A/C company come out anyway and do an inspection along with a consultation on the garage (because we are going to convert it into a studio in the future). Anyway, while Dan talked with the A/C man, I had fun puzzling out more flooring to put down.