Saturday, August 11, 2007

New Floors for the Front Room

Today we took on the front room of the house with the help of my parents, my dad's friend Murray, and my good friend Erin. We knew there was tile under the carpeting, and that it might be a pain to take it out. Mom was suggesting we just put the new floor right on top of the tile and leave it. Dad wasn't having any of that - no half-assing the job. So we pull up the carpet on the half of the room the piano is not on (and again it is gone 10 minutes after we put it out on the curb) and discover linoleum. Pull up the linoleum, and there is the tile. We start chipping through the tile to discover not one, but two additional layers of tile.

Suddenly the problem with the doors makes sense. The front door and the side door never sat properly in the door frame - the bottom was too high. We'd had to buy special thresholds that are adjustable so that we could raise the bottom of the door frame by about 1.5". Clearly instead of pulling up old flooring when installing new, the new was just installed over top, and the bottom of the door was shaved off in order to fit over the top of the flooring.

So we did the right thing and took out all the old flooring. Once one side was done we got ready to move the piano to the now bare side so we could remove the rest of the flooring. We all gathered around this piano - the goal was to lift it out of the indentations in the carpet and roll it over to the other side. Ready... go.

"WOAH... Hold on!" The leg on Bobby's side, which is the side we were moving towards, had began to buckle under the piano the moment we'd moved towards it. The leg is not even attached - there are screws, but they are just barely hanging there, and when the piano was moved slightly, they'd fallen right out. We re-adjusted our method a bit - the boys actually picked that side up - and moved it to the other side of the room. Then Bobby pulls an old amplifier out of the garage to prop on its side under the piano, throws some phone books on it, and they set the piano down on it.

I about had a heart attack. We went about taking the rest of the flooring out and then took a break - the boys went for beer, and Mom went to visit Gpa. When she told Gpa about the fiasco with the piano, his response was, "Oh yeah, that's been broken for years." Um, ya think you could have told us that when we told you we were putting new floors in? Oi.

At lunch the boys were drinking beer, and Mom doesn't like beer, so I pulled out the bottle of a really good Cabernet that I got in my first Wine Club shipment from Wine.com. When Bobby had tasted it the night before he was so enamored with it that he wanted to buy a case. I had Mom try some, and she wanted to buy a case. As a wine club member I get 15% off, so I went to place the order for us both, and found that there were only 11 bottles left in stock. So I bought them all and we decided to split what there was (I let her take 6, since she intended to send two to my aunt and bring two to Italy with her - I wanted her to have 2 to enjoy).

We'd started at about 10am, and at about 9:30pm we finally got the last peice of flooring in. Then we had a party to get to, so I let my parents clean up and jumped in the shower...

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