A New Found Respect for Flooring Installers - October 19 - 21, 2007

I've got to hand it to those who install hardwood flooring for a living. It's a long process. It took us the entire weekend to get the living room done. I thought we'd be done the whole house by the end of the weekend, and Dad thought that we'd at least get the living room done by the end of Saturday.

First of all, we went to the house Thursday night after work and nothing had been done. Nothing that we noticed, anyway, so I didn't take any pictures, and didn't post on the blog.

I took half of the day off on Friday to get some groceries and supplies that we would need for the weekend of work that we had ahead of us. I picked up Ryan and my mom and we went home to pick up other supplies that we would need, and then headed out to the house to drop the supplies off. Norm the Painter was there when we got there, and he was just cleaning up his paint rollers; he had painted the ceilings throughout the house, so he was ready to paint the walls. He told us that he was going to come out on Saturday to work on the upstairs while we were working on the main floor. (He didn't end up coming out to work...it was probably better for all of us...he probably wouldn't have gotten much painting done...he'd be too busy laughing at us and wondering what on earth we were doing). We then went to Mom & Dad's place and loaded up their truck and our car again, and then headed out to the house yet again. Ryan took a look at the wood and decided that the job we (and by we, I mean he) did when we (again, he) were (was) removing the heads off of the nails wasn't that good of a job, and had to be redone. All of it. Redone. Fine. We went home after unloading the vehicles, had supper, and then went to bed.

We got up at 4:30 a.m. and got things ready to go to the house. I packed the food, made some chicken noodle soup (my mom wasn't feeling that good on Friday), and we loaded more stuff into the car. You'd think we were moving there already with the amount of stuff we brought. We got everything loaded and had some breakfast, and got to the house at about 5:45 a.m. We unloaded everything and got to work on pounding the nails out of the hardwood. It was "fun".

Saturday - 5:48 a.m.:

Mom and Dad got there at about 8:00ish and Dad started working on laying the tar paper out and figuring out how they were going to start. Mom and I and Ryan continued to remove the nails from the wood.

Saturday - 8:32 a.m.

At about 10:00 I think the first board was finally installed. Shortly after that, Mom and I had to head into Lorette to find a bathroom. We also had to go and find some shorter screws for the first few rows of boards (the floor nailer wouldn't fit in properly), and another countersink bit. We went to a little hardware store in Lorette, and what a mistake. We couldn't find anything we were looking for. We ended up finding a bit that we needed, but couldn't find any screws that were short enough. We called and Dad answered the phone and told us that they would just make do with what they had.

I can't remember what time Ryan's brother got there, but he was out there helping us too. I don't think that the two of us could have done anything without the help that we were given.

Saturday - 12:24 p.m.:

Ryan wished that we could have had a time-lapse camera so that you could watch quickly how the floor went in. These pictures are the best that we could do.

Saturday - 1:38 p.m.:

Saturday - 2:28 p.m.:

Ryan's mom came by at about 3:00ish to help out. Ryan's brother left shortly after that, so I took his place, and Ryan's mom had the fun job of hammering out the nails. The mom's worked on that for the remainder of the day.

Saturday - 4:33 p.m.:

Saturday - 8:33 p.m.:

We called it quits at about 9:30 p.m. and went home to rest up for the next long day that we were sure to endure.

Sunday morning we got up at 6:00 and again, packed the food up for the day and had some breakfast and got to the house at about 8:00 a.m. and started working again.

Sunday - 11:47 a.m.:

Sunday - 1:57 p.m.:

Sunday - 5:52 p.m.:

And finally...

Sunday - 8:40 p.m.:

I think that Dad summed up what everyone was thinking and feeling like at that point...

We cleaned up after finishing the floor and tried to put everything back where it was before we started. The painter is going to be painting the walls starting on Monday, so we wanted to make sure there was nothing really in his way. We are going to be working on the dining room floor starting on Monday, which should also be interesting...hopefully it will go a bit quicker, but I'm not so sure of that...

We couldn't have finished the floor so quickly without all of the help that we got from our families. We owe them big time.