Decoration

The carpet installers left at 2 p.m., and I set to the task of cleaning and putting my living room back together. The one thing that I wanted to create in this space was an area that could cultivate conversation. My living room is rather thin and long, and before this renovation all of the furniture had been oriented towards watching the television rather than providing for eye contact.

Well, I no longer have cable service, so the television was not going to be forced into the same corner it had been evacuated from during the flood. I decided to banish the television to the other side of the living room, and center the couch along the short wall underneath the framed collage of photographs I had been cultivating. As soon as the couch was in place, the rest of the room sort of fell together… and somewhere in the process I lost two grossly large end tables, gained an attractive circular end table, and lost the bookshelf top of the hutch.

I kept the base of the hutch in the room (couldn’t give up the storage), and on it I placed a few special items. One was a framed black-and-white photograph of my grandparents from when they were courting, and in it my grandfather is in uniform and my grandmother is holding a camera. After my grandfather died, Grandma gave me that camera and a variety of Kodak filters in their original, bright yellow packaging. I staged these items around the photograph, along with a table lamp, a spider plant, and my childhood Hickory Dickory Dock piggy bank. I love this space now — it’s a great homage to my history.

What emerged from this expulsion of extra crap and countless knick-knacks was a more streamlined, seemingly larger living room that provided plenty of face-to-face seating opportunities (and even kept a view of the TV for movie opportunities).

I absolutely love it.

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Helping hands

Lately my social life is nonexistent and the only people in my social circle (outside of work) are those that are willing and able to lend a hand (and hopefully not donate a finger) towards my current home improvement project: preparing for carpet install. To recap, I left you all at the point where I was ripping up carpet, padding and staples. (See also, bloodletting.)

The next step was getting this pile of nastiness to the dump, which was accomplished thank to my friend Joe who met me with a truck and a willingness to hurl rolls of carpet through the air.

Next came the fun part: POWER TOOLS. An air compressor-driven chisel, to be exact. I made plans to meet Mom & Dad at 6 p.m., but got waylaid leaving work and ended up being 20 minutes late. My amazing mom was mowing my jungle of a yard (hey, I haven’t been home — don’t judge!), and I rushed inside to see this:

That’s right, my wounded father with the almost-severed left index finger that is still swollen and barely bendable had almost completely finished chiseling all of the 27 six-by-six-inch burnt sienna-colored tiles up from in front of my fireplace. Luckily, since I wanted to try using the air chisel, there was still a decent layer of Thinset left to work up off of the concrete. And doubly-lucky, my friend Chris reported in order to give me someone to pass the chisel off to when my arms got tired.

I’m so glad that I’ve learned to say “Hell yeah, c’mon over and I’ll find you a job!” when people volunteer to help… I guess I had to learn at some point, right?!

Now I just have to work on getting home before my parents report for duty, because MAN, THEY WORK QUICKLY!

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Extension cords, splinters & sweat

First came the water, then the fire… Just last week I scheduled the installation of my new living room carpet, which meant looking at my calendar and figuring out when I was going to do all of the work that has to be done before the contractors arrive:

Patching the hole in the drywall… (Thanks Mike, for doing this while I was in Colorado!)

Repainting the living room walls…

… and removing all of the carpet, padding, dust and staples from the upstairs hallway, stairs and living room.

As of today (Monday, August 3), all of the carpet has been cut into strips, rolled & taped up and piled in the middle of the living room — waiting for this upcoming Friday to be taken to the dump and disposed of. What I have to look forward to is removing all of the tile from in front of the fireplace and retiling that same area, scraping all of the glue up off the concrete floor of the living room, screwing down the plywood boards in the upstairs hall to stop the squeaking, and scraping & repainting all of the trim in the areas that will be recarpeted.

Let the games begin.

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