Too Much Laying Around

"I don't want to miss too much laying around," announced my niece. Gareth had suggested the family take a hike on this, the day after Thanksgiving, and my first opportunity in weeks to contribute to this blog.

Eventually, Carly agreed to go along with her uncle, dad, little sister and cousin ("as long as it's not too far"). She is working on her college application essay and may be trying to avoid it - otherwise, why would she change her mind so abruptly?

Gareth thought he saw an in. His attempts to get me to come along crashed and burned. ("Are you #$#! nuts?" is what I think I answered. Except I only thought the expletive. After all, there are kids around.)

We are once again enjoying the holiday with my sister's family in Sacramento, and have spent the entire morning sharing personal websites and blogs with each other. My two nieces have created sites over at freewebs.com, and Carly (who is a senior in high school) proudly pointed me over to the ones of her friends. Kids today have many more creative options than we did in my day.

It's been approximately six weeks since my last confession. The last three months have been a blur, but here I will try to post a quick update - but here's a warning: our lives have been hijacked by home improvement.

October 10 was the day we were set to visit family friends who had moved to San Diego. This trip had been postponed and rescheduled a couple of times and we were determined to see it through this time - even when I came home on the 9th and discovered that our air conditioner had leaked a ton of water, soaking the carpet down to the pad.

My first thought was to postpone the trip yet again, but I couldn't bear to do that to Megan, who had already been disappointed twice. The weather had turned mild, so we turned the A/C off for the weekend, scheduled a service call for Monday and went ahead with our travel plans. I was afraid that without paying for dryers, we were inviting a big mold problem. I told Gareth it was time to consider replacing it.

We had been down this road before. A couple of years ago, we had scraped together enough money to (we'd hoped!) replace both the carpet and the windows. We spent several weeks researching our options: vinyl or casement? Pergo or wood? We knew what we wanted, and we couldn't afford it. And by the time we realized that we might have to lower our expectations, the inevitable happened: a plumbing disaster. After replacing our sewer line, we were left with a little more than half our original budget, which meant we had to choose between the windows or the floors. So we did nothing. Now, the A/C mishap made the decision for us.

We spent the next couple of weeks revisiting our flooring options. We figured the carpet in the bedrooms could remain a while, so we paid Lowe's $50 to come and measure our living room, dining room, kitchen and hallway. I was pushing for laminate - I felt it looked good enough and would be low maintenance enough for us (housework is not my forte).

But Gareth could not bring himself to get excited about Pergo. He kept coming back to the wood, which of course, did look better... and cost lots more. I insisted we couldn't afford it. I didn't even want to pay for the top-of-the line Pergo - even that was too expensive. We were at the same impasse as before.

Then I noticed an advertisement in the L.A. Times for a discounter that promised up to 70% off the prices at Home Depot and Lowe's. Their Camarillo location is not too far from us; we decided to check them out. They lived up to their promises - I concluded we could get the top of the line Pergo if we ordered from them and used their installer. But Gareth noticed that they had a couple of lines of engineered wood that actually cost less than the Pergo.

"Get the wood," advised our friend, Tim. He's a REALTOR and pointed out that laminate flooring never added to the resale value of a home. He wasn't crazy about engineered wood, either - but admitted that listing the home as having wood floors would be helpful when it came time to sell. We got the wood, but only after I talked him into painting the interior himself (instead of hiring a professional).

Javier-the-Floor-Guy suggested that nailing the wood to a subfloor was the preferred installation, but the guys at the store had told us we could get by with the cheaper floating method. We were told we could save money by going to Home Depot to purchase our new baseboards (needed to anchor the floor). While there, we also picked out a new color scheme for the walls and bought paint. The earliest date for the installation was Nov. 15 - surely we could finish the painting in two weekends, right?

After moving out all of our furniture (except the big pieces in the living room), packing away the crystal and serving pieces that were normally stored within, removing the old baseboards, sanding, masking, and otherwise prepping our walls, Gareth was finally ready to start painting at 2:30 p.m. on the 14th.

He did as well as he could while he still had some light - the lower half of the walls were done. We would have to finish later. Javier was coming.

"No wonder we've never done this before," I remarked, as I surveyed our house.
All three bedrooms were packed with stuff that was normally kept in the living room/dining room. We had no good place to store the rest of the contents of our house. When my sister put her floor in years ago, she carted everything out to her backyard - but that was summertime. It tends to rain in November.

So we decided to rent a U-Haul truck to store the big pieces.  It would only be for 24 hours.

Javier and his crew arrived on Monday as scheduled and got to work. It wasn't long before they delivered some bad news: the moisture level of our home's concrete slab was too high for a successful floating installation. We would need to go with the much more expensive subfloor and nail process. Oh well. It's only money, right?

But there was more bad news. Instead of the expected one-day process (overly optimistic!), Javier estimated the job would take three. "Well, at least we don't have to stay in a hotel overnight," I said (with the floating process, we would have been unable to walk on the floor for 24 hours while the glue dried and I had made a reservation at the Hyatt in Santa Clarita, near Gareth's work). Javier shook his head. "Two nights," he said. I wished I had found rooms at the Travelodge instead. I chalked it up to the cost of the home renovation.

Two days stretched to three. On Thursday, Javier finally finished the job, and his fee was a little less than twice his original estimate.

But our floors are beautiful. And eventually, we'll manage to move all the furniture back in place. Except for the old blond wood Ikea stuff that now clashes with our gorgeous wood floor. We're shopping for a new dining set and entertainment unit. And looking ahead to replacing the rest of the stuff in the house that bugs us. This is something we'll probably only talk about for the next couple of years. Home improvement is just too expensive.