When we last met, I was waxing angsty about trying to sell our condo and buy the affordable version of our dream home.
Success! After much nail-biting, we closed two weeks ago, and have spent several nights both in and out of our NEW HOME.
We have $everal project$ that we wanted to get out of way immediately. The first order of business was to update the flooring.
The first stage in this endeavour was to move all our furniture from a Devil’s Tower-like formation in the living room, to a more Badlands-type formation in the basement.
The second order of the week was to pull up all the stinky, dusty carpet from the floors and get it the hell out of the house. This took most of the week. Some rooms were easy – the carpet lifted away from old hardwood floors as though it was looking for liberation from the home, the promise of a better life (When said carpet met my folding carpet razor, such thoughts quickly turned to horror).
The stairway carpet was another matter. Whoever was hired to carpet the stairs and upstairs hallway, was either a tremendous overachiever in the business of stapling carpet to wood, or was simply paid by the staple. At last count, Leah and I extracted ten million four hundred thousand two hundred ninety-eight staples from solid white oak floors. In the days that followed, our bare feet would detect a small number over-looked, embedded staples. Not in a “Oh shit I just stepped on a staple and I’m bleeding” kind of way, but more of a Princess and the Pea kind of way, that led to one of us yelling to the other for the nearest needle-nose pliers.
Next, we sought out three references for floor guys. Guy #1: Let’s call him Enrique (because that’s his name). Enrique offered to come to our home to measure the floors and give us an estimate. Two hours later, three teenagers showed up at our house with a tape measure, pencil, paper, and two hundred word English vocab. These youngsters were Enrique’s two teenage sons and their teenage cousin who spoke no English, not even easy words, like “hello”, and “goodbye”. Within four minutes of being in our home, the youngest of the group bumped his head hard on the sloped closet ceiling, immediately making me think about insurance. After some hasty scribbling of measurements, I was given a ridiculously low estimate, even though the boys didn’t know what lay under a particular 30 sqare ft area of old tile in the front hallway. Needless to say, we had some reservations.
As it turns out, references two and three were the same guy. Let’s call him Bogden, because that’s what we’re 93% sure his name is. Bogden looks like Bjorn Borg meets Daniel Craig’s crazy older cousin. Bogden gave us a reasonable quote, seemed to know what he was talking about, and has been working on the floors in our house for several days. In the meantime, we’ve either been resigned to sleeping on a mattress in the family room, which is the only room not being worked on (yet), or using Hyatt points to stay at a fume-free enviroment way out in the Northwest ‘burbs.
Thus far, Bogden has been as skilled at flooring as Borg was at dispatching opponents, albeit a bit slower in his work.
I’ll post some pics when the floors are all done. Attached are some “before” photos.
