I wish I had exciting things to blog about right now. I wish I had pages of race reporting to give to you. I originally typed “reporting” as “repotting” but I don’t even have that. My house plants have been firmly potted for years and planting season around here doesn’t start until late May.
So with lack of anything better to blog about (true I have been training but ho hum haven’t we all), I turn to the installment of my……
(drumroll please)
New wood floors.
PEOPLE: Did you hear me? NEW WOOD FLOORS. It’s safe to say that I’m a little on edge and it’s safe to assume that the answer to anything right now – ESPECIALLY after 9 pm – is “no”. Why? Enter installment of wood floor to span the living and dining room along with the refinishing of the bathroom, kitchen and foyer wood floor. This is major household surgery. This might require that for a few days I need to leave my house. The house I live in, eat in, work in, train in (that’s right, it’s still snowing here and my tally of outdoor rides this year is currently at ONE)…
How will I ever get anything done?
My husband’s suggestion? Go live with his parents for a week. Next. No really, may I have what is behind door number two? The door that does not lead directly into their home? Three adults – including one Popo – two small dogs added to my small dog and a cuckoo clock that goes off every-single-hour-of-the-day (and night)?
No thank you, I’ll pass.
As you can see, the logistics, the “what ifs” are starting to make me antsy. Of course husband is in charge of all things household repair and maintenance so he coordinated this. I have not yet gotten a straight story about when this is happening, how long it takes, who will be here, what I need to do and I do not like unknowns. Nor surprises. Nor anything else that involves disruption of my life in my home. Husband’s answer to this? 12 hours prior to the delivery of a massive forest of wood into my living room he sent me an email about wood arriving….
Tomorrow.
Still imagine my surprise when at 8 am a man with a mullet, a ball cap, stonewashed jeans and reeking of cigarettes rings my doorbell while I stand there with bedhead in pink pajamas bottoms only to hear him say:
“I’ve got some wood for you.”
Excuse me – is anyone else as freaked out by this as I was? This is like some bad fantasy come true that a man shows up at my door, while my husband is gone, ready to show me…(please cover your ears) wood yet the one small detail that my dreamweaver happened to overlook is the fact that my fantasy NEVER included Jethro the mullet-wearing Nascar loving bubba who drives a pick up truck and lives in PawPaw (true, it’s a suburb of Sandwich, I heard this on the radio the other day…and I’m a little scared because since when was Sandwich big enough to spawn a suburb?).
This pile of wood now rests in our living room measuring 6 x 2 x 3. I don’t remember much about geometry but I’m guessing that means length x width x height. In feet. That’s a lot of wood! And I heard it needs to sit in our house to get used to us. Just to be sure it is ready to lay on our floors and be walked all over for the rest of it’s life.
And how will I know if the wood is not ready? Hmmmph, Jethro?
Since then I have been slowly deconstructing our first floor. Turns out that my husband leaves at the most (in)convenient of times. He goes away on the weekend when things need to be moved. So I spent a good part of this weekend moving our entire first floor up to the second floor and left the big things behind (I cannot carry a couch on my back) and I am protesting the 200 pound television. And let me just add that once that television is moved out of our house, it is not coming back in.
If you are looking for a 200 pound television check my curb on Wednesday night.
Simply put this has been a lot of work. We don’t have many things but I kind of like the orderliness of my things – I don’t like them strewn all over my house and seeing my downstairs furniture upstairs is disrupting the feng shui. I have no idea what that really means but Chris in the spirit of feng shui once told me that we cannot have mirrors in the bedroom, doors facing east, staircases leading anywhere but west…whatever, my universe is totally out of whack right now including all 7 of my chakras. All I can think about is that everything will need to be moved back downstairs and on top of that – need to be cleaned.
Now, when you add work by having to move things around something else has to give, right? Or else the equation of work becomes too out of balance, too much work and not enough whatever else we do with our time. And so somewhere else I had to slack off. In cleaning of the carpet that remains for a few more days.
I see no point in vacuuming the carpet since it’s going away anyways. And when I drop food on it, I see no point in wiping it up. And no point in wiping crumbs off the counter when I can just fling them on to the carpet instead.
In a few days – it’s gone. Not my problem anymore.
I mentioned to Chris that I think we should give our carpet a going away party the night before the wood floor work begins. Spend a few hours just partying hard on it. Spilling coffee, dumping dinner plates, a little nail polish (do I own any?), a lot of red wine, let Boss go run in the field behind our house and pick up some the stale blue corn chips that a neighbor just had to throw back there to feed the POOR LITTLE WILD ANIMALS that have not existed for eons without us evolving with the food that is naturally available to them – yes, eat those chips, come back inside and barf them up in a mess of yellow slime and bile all over our carpet indoors.
Indeed Boss did this a few weeks ago which prompted the “maybe we should get wood floors?” discussion.
And I suspect that while I will enjoy the new wood floors (easier to clean, better for allergies) Boss is in for a shock. Oh, he’ll find somewhere else to throw up but will he find somewhere else to potty? He doesn’t potty inside often but when it gets too cold or snowy or his morning poo is mysteriously absent then we leave the house – well, sometimes he can’t hold it. That is life with a little dog. I am convinced it is a texture thing – the carpet feels like the grass so I am convinced this problem will disappear along with the carpeting. But just for fun I told Chris we would should celebrate by defecating – all humans and dogs – on the carpet one last time because we can. Maybe it really IS exciting to poo in the corner by the rubber tree. Maybe I just NEED to find out.
Not only that but the future of crazy laps is hanging perilously on whether or not Boss’ tiny paws have traction enough to make a 360 on a wooden floor without slamming himself face first into the wall. I told Chris we need to start looking for a carpet that will allow Boss a single track around our living room – so basically we need an oval with the inside cut out. And as a runner, I will insist every time he runs by us in lane 1 he will need to shout “TRACK” or “LANE 1” to make his presence known.
As if all of that wasn’t enough to throw me over the edge this week, I have to welcome in several strange men to work in my house. Maybe while I’m here, maybe not. I don’t like this. Neither does Boss (he doesn’t like strange men, only my father in law and Chris…I know, it’s a rule that doesn’t make much sense considering they are both sorta strange…I have proof…the other day my father in law worked both pole dancing AND Bernoulli’s Principle into a conversation and it was just…strange).
Tonight Chris did his part in preparing the house. He removed the downstairs toilet and moved two speakers. Well that was just great. I hauled a leather ottoman, 3 lamps, a dozen plants, 2 tables (one taller than me), 2 chairs and countless other household trinkets up two flights of stairs and homeslice….
….moved a toilet.
And then he announced he was leaving town for another work trip. Bad enough that he is going to Milwaukee – yet again – worse that I am going to have to wait in my house for a bunch of men to appear at my door peddling wood.
Who got luckier here?
At least when this is all said and done I will be able to cross one thing off of my weekly to-do list: vacuuming. Which should free up about 2 minutes in my life. 2 minutes I will probably have to spend hunting around my house to see where Boss made the potty now that the carpeting is gone.
It might just be easier for the men to roll me up in the carpet when they remove it and put me out at the curb, too.
(if you drive by on Wednesday night could you pick me up?)
