The Ultimate Craft Project

Last Thursday morning, Chad and I started prepping our little condo for its new hardwood floor. We woke up, had a nice breakfast, coffee, and took some deep breaths. We scrutinized the waist-high pile of flooring and underlayment rolls blocking our bedroom door.



The living room was up first. We started unloading the three big bookshelves, and piling all the books in the bedroom. We disassembled my crafty station, and moved everything we could into the solarium. We decided to not disassemble the couch, but just moved it from one side of the room to the other. And the dining table was pressed into service as a workbench/saw table. David lent us his awesome mitre saw, which was truly indispensable. No sooner had the last piece of furniture left the living room was Chad slashing at the carpet with an exacto knife and ripping it out by the roots—disgusting, decrepit underpad and all.


We rolled the carpet up into big logs, and Chad heaved it onto his shoulder, took it downstairs and started a Sanford & Son-style pile on top of the Sunfire in the parking garage. We were just waiting for the polite call from the building management: “Um, Mrs. Harkness, we’re going to have to ask you to find another place for the carpet.”

The carpet was affixed to the floor (as is most carpet in North America) by means of a thin wood strip with spiky nails poking up through it—as Chad put it, a very sinister way to install carpet (see photo of spiky box of tetanus death above). So we pulled up all the spiky strips with a hammer, and later with a crowbar.
Once all the carpet and spiky strips were gone, we had disgusting brown snowdrifts of carpet underpad dust to clean up, which we did by shop-vac and good old-fashioned broom and dustpan.

And then, once 24 hours had elapsed since the flooring was delivered, and we had a nice, clean expanse of concrete to work on, we rolled out the new padded underlayment and started clicking together the flooring. Laying the flooring itself was surprisingly easy. The flooring we chose is truly excellent, and clicked together dreamily. Our flooring comes in “random lengths,” which means, obviously, that all the pieces are different lengths, which is really efficient: if you need a short piece to end a row, you just search the box for a short piece, and you don’t have to sacrifice a four-foot piece to fill a foot-long space. Very ingenious, and it leads to very little waste.

So, on we went with assembling the giant puzzle/mosaic.

By Thursday evening, we had about half of the living room done. On Friday, we finished the living room up to the point where it starts to run into the bedroom, and we had to stop because Jim and Linda were arriving to help for the weekend, and the bedroom hadn’t been prepped.

Phew. Saturday morning, Jim, Linda, Chad and I were up at 7:30 for breakfast. We weren’t allowed to start making renovation noise until 11:00 a.m., so we started by moving everything out of the bedroom and solarium, into the newly finished living room. Then Chad and Jim ripped up all the carpet and spiky strips. When 11:00 rolled around, we started shop-vacing up the mess and rolling out the underlayment.

Then commenced a truly slick operation, with two teams working on two rooms: Jim and I on the small but fussy solarium; Chad and his mom on the big but more straightforward bedroom. It was cute to see Jim and Linda working so intently, clearly having so much fun just being part of the mess.

At about 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, with two hours to go until the noise-making period was over at 5:00, I silently suffered a small internal fit. The living room/workshop had hit a point of disarray, destruction and dirtiness that I thought would be impossible to reverse. The living room was like the wood-cutting station at Home Depot. There was a lineup: Chad waiting for the mitre saw, Jim carefully cutting a piece lengthwise with the jigsaw, me waiting to cut an end piece. There were veritable heaps of sawdust on the table and under it, the saw spewing even more directly onto the wall and bookshelves. The living room felt like a cave, with stuff piled up to the ceiling. Grammar was understandably hiding somewhere, not having been seen for hours.

But then, we began to see the light. Jim and I finished up the solarium, performing a fancy feat by gouging out the bottom of some planks to accommodate some unremovable protrusions in the concrete floor. This dangerous manoeuvre involved me holding the whirring mitre saw while he manually held the plank against the blade to shave off as much of the underside as he could. Chad and Linda were in the home stretch in the bedroom. A production line formed: Linda and I quickly searching the box of flooring for appropriately sized pieces, Chad measuring and marking for cutting, passing the pieces off to Jim for cutting and quick return to the bedroom. At 5:20 p.m., the last piece was snapped into place in the closet.


The end result:
-a beautiful course of panels that runs straight as an arrow from the front door, through the bedroom, and lines up perfectly with the panels in the solarium.
-some impressive precision-cut angles at the junction of kitchen and front hall
-some fancy “custom Chad triangles ‘n skinny strips” where whole panels wouldn’t fit
-a gorgeous, marbled, glowing, organic, beautifully schizophrenic floor that makes me a bit teary