Project progress & lessons learned

I'll admit it. I love alliteration.

moldy carpet = confirmation that new floors are an awesome idea

This week, Eric and I "broke ground" on our huge floor-laying project. We hauled a ton of the flooring in from the garage so the wood could acclimate to the temperature of the house and got to work ripping up carpet in one of the guest rooms. Side note: per our modus operandi, we started this huge project with only three days to work before my parents come to town. This is important not because my parents can't see past a home improvement project, trust me, they can. It is important because they need to sleep in the room that is housing all of the furniture from the room we are currently working in. We started a different huge project in the days before Matt and Meg visited and consequently were working into twilight in order to get the house ready for visitors. I'm not complaining, though, I actually like it! I've always worked better this way. For some reason, I thrive on the feeling of last-minute-ness.

Okay, back to the project. A couple of lessons. First, when laying a floating laminate floor, the beginning is infinitely harder than the rest of it. In the beginning, we were convinced that we were royally screwing up and that we had definitely bitten of more than we could chew. Fortunately, with each subsequent row, the process became easier and we worked faster. Pictures sometimes tell a story better than words, so let's put it this way:

Here is our progress after night one (approximately 4-5 hours of work)

And we were proud of this! It took a lot of work, sweat, near-tears, and a few spousal spats to get to this point.










Here is our progress after night two (approximately 4-5 hours of work)

Talk about progress! By the end of this night, we were exhausted, but feeling pretty good about ourselves and our ability to carry this project to fruition.

The second big lesson learned, is that things are never as easy as they appear to be on TV, where floor clicks into place with the push of a thumb and time-lapse film is used to show progress. Patience is key and sometimes you break things.

 

holy green bean!

The outside of the house is being worked on, too. We wanted to add a pop of color to the house. I'm not sure this is what we had in mind...but it is hard to tell during this phase of the project. It doesn't help that I can hear the guys painting it talking about how they feel like they're taking a "trip to Willy Wonka Land." Or that the color reminds them of their favorite childhood move, The Wizard of Oz, because it's the same color as the witch's face. But I have faith that it will look good in the end. This isn't the first time that color has been scary initially only to come out looking nice. Anyway, if it's a complete disaster, there's always more paint!

So far, DIY house projects have been tons work, stressful at times, and a lot of fun. There is nothing like seeing the progress of your own hard work. It's also a great opportunity to learn more about yourself and your partner. Eric's a rockstar partner when it comes to this stuff and hopefully he can say the same about me.