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This only my nineth entry for Holidailies -- I'd better not miss any more...
(Just wander in from Holidailies? There's an introduction to the main characters
down towards the bottom of the page... just scroll down.) |
A few days ago I mentioned our current renovation project. We are having
new hardwood flooring put down in Jill's room and Jeremy's room and the
upstairs hallway.
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Those rooms (and the hallway and the closets in both
bedrooms and all three
hallway closets) had wall-to-wall carpeting.
So, before the flooring can be installed, all of the carpeting has to be
ripped up and removed. (The way to do this is to slice it into two or three
feet wide strips first.) |
| After ripping up the carpet, you then have to pry up the tacking strips
that held the edges of the carpet along all walls. You also have to pry
up all of the staples (and the scaps of carpet padding that they still
hold in place). This means lots of sitting or kneeling. It is especially
fun (not) in the smaller closets. |
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Of course before any of this could be done, the bedrooms (and their closets)
had to be emptied. Jeremy was 10 and Jill was 13 when we moved into this
house in February, 1996. There is a lot of "stuff" that can accumulate
in more than thirteen years. Furniture has to be put somewhere while the
work goes on. (Our bedroom is now an obstacle course of furniture... and
so is the livingroom... and we still haven't put up a Christmas tree!)
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Oh yes, don't forget painting. After all, if you are spending a fortune
on new flooring, it makes sense to do the painting before the installation.
(I'm worried that Nancy's smile in the picture on the right is really saying
"Don't you dare put these pictures of me in my painting clothes on
the Internet.") The wires haning down from her ears are connecting
earbuds to her MP3 player -- she loves to listen to audio books while she
works.
The preparation work is done. The flooring installers are due to arrive
on Monday. (Yes, of course, there will be pictures of the new floors.)
| An introduction for those of you wandering in here from Holidailies
for the first time: I'm just a middle-aged guy (but somehow I hit 65 on my last birthday) who
lives in Rhode Island with my wife Nancy (a middle-school math teacher), daughter Gillian
("Jill" -- 26 yr old baker and part-time college student), son Jeremy (23 yr old
restaurant cook and part-time college student), and Tiger (senior citizen cat). Eldest child Adam
lives in New York City with his wife Leah and our grandsons Sam and Milo. I'm a programmer/systems
analyst who got involved with software training and instructional design. I currently work from
home doing quality assurance and editing on course material for both classroom courses and Web-
based training courses for a very big computer company. I've been writing this online journal
since 1996. |
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