Tidbits
Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…
Photos
Floor Renovation
June 11, 2009, 10:35 pm
So we completed our first major renovation of the house earlier this month, by replacing the flooring on the entire first floor. The living room was carpeted, and the rest was vinyl. Mike wasn’t particularly pleased with them even when we got the place, and he finally got around to putting in new flooring. I was dragged along kicking and screaming, as usual, cause it’s not cheap, I didn’t mind vinyl and carpet, and it’s a lot of work, even though we got someone else to do the actual install.
First we had to shop around different flooring places. There is a surprisingly large number of them in Waterloo itself, and Mike seemed keen on visiting them all. We skipped the ones that are not opened on weekends. At least choosing the actual type of floor was easy, I’ve always wanted bamboo floors ever since I learned they existed. Cork was another new material that I was curious about, especially after seeing that they don’t even have to look like cork. We also saw leather floors, which can actually look really really snazzy. Way too expensive though.
Eventually, we settled on Waterloo Hardwood Floors, which had a good balance of nice quality flooring and affordable installation.
Then came the prep work. That included clearing everything from the first floor and stuffing them into one of the upstairs bedrooms, garage, and basement. Then we had to remove the old carpet, underpad, and carpet tacks from the living room. Cabinets and the stove had to be removed. The first floor toilet as well.
It took the flooring guy two and half days to install everything. He had to first put in a thin layer of plywood in the living room to bring it level with the dining area. The guy was efficient, had a lot of tools, and we were generally pleased with the work. We were also thinking that if we had to do it ourselves, it would probably take a whole month or more, and we won’t even have the right equipment. The cork was floating, but the bamboo had to be nailed down. So if you are doing it yourself, use floating floors.
Here are the results:
Living Room
Kitchen
Mike re-install the toilet today. We are keeping our fingers crossed that nothing went wrong with it. The toilet is actually fairly simple to remove and install, but when things go wrong, they can go really really wrong.
Now the only reminding challenge is to put everything we packed away back. The only problem is that Mike no longer letting certain furniture pieces in the garage back into the house because they don’t belong with the “theme” of the house anymore… That’s great and all, but where am I gonna put all my stuff? Maybe I’ll sneak everything back in when he runs off to China without me later this summer.
Tagged: House
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