Construction With Cookies – Day 19? Already??

I forfeited sleeping in Saturday so I could get up early to get the construction cookie – Glazed Apple Bars – in the oven before Dean wanted to make us breakfast in our tiny kitchen.  I know,

we’re retired and every day is Saturday for us, but for some reason, Saturday and Sunday still feel different than a week day.  Maybe because we get two days off from the gym.  Or maybe because during the week, breakfast is yogurt and granola but on the weekend Dean makes us an awesome breakfast – pancakes or waffles or crepes or German pancake … except for this Saturday.  This Saturday my worker bee was here at 8:30 to TEXTURE the walls!  It seemed a bit weird to be eating breakfast at the dining room table while he was running up and down the stairs and working his little bee butt off, so it was coffee and oatmeal in the family room with a Glazed Apple Bar chaser.

I had been bracing for a dust storm, especially when I saw my bee taping up plastic.  

The dust from the trimming and cutting and hanging of the wall board had been bad enough so I was not looking forward to a fog of dried mud dust.  But as it turned out, there was none.  He used a damp sponge to sand.  Who knew?   By noon my drywall bee had completed the sanding, had textured all the walls, had rolled up his hose and loaded that plus his compressor in the back of his pickup, gently placed a plate of Apple Bars on the seat next to him, and driven off.  Leaving his neatly folded and packed garbage behind.  

I really think he was concentrating so hard on trying to unobtrusively wipe the saliva from his chin as he watched me pack up his plate of Apple Bars that he forgot to go back down and throw it in the back of his pickup. 

We’re getting so excited see the light at the end of the tunnel that we bought our fake-wood-looking vinyl plank floating floor yesterday. Carpet just isn’t practical for our household.  Angus has been known to barf up grass or purple plastic chunks from an indestructible toy or the stuffing from a plush animal or wood chips from a stick or long strings of a braided rope.  He does it so quietly we don’t realize he’s even puked until we slip in the slime.  Sophie and Maisie like to barf up hairballs, although they do make very loud retching noises so we are forewarned and rarely step in a pile of cat puke.  And Dean likes to spill  eat in front of the TV now and then.  

Dean and I plan to install the floor ourselves (gulp) and I'm already getting nervous and stressing about it. (If any of you have installed this flooring before and have any tips, please, please, please, share.)  The reviews say it will be easy and relatively fast to install.  But everything is more complicated for us and absolutely nothing is fast for us.  Dean already told me I need to scrape up any texture left on the floor so it will be perfectly smooth when we start.  It doesn’t matter that I’d already spent hours on Sunday dusting ...

... as well as vacuuming and mopping the basement floor.  It doesn’t matter that the directions state specifically you only need to worry about any difference in the floor of 1/8 inch or more.  It doesn’t matter that I am planning to fill any small holes or cracks with some special cement leveler

Really?  I have still have to scrape those tiny splats?  Seriously?

just like the directions say I should.  It doesn’t matter that most of those splats are just that, a splat that can barely be felt with my finger.  No.  Our floor will be smooth as silk before we begin.  I’m just taking deep breaths and telling myself that when we finish the floor it will be perfect because, while I just want to get it done, Dean does everything really, really meticulously and methodically and deliberately and it always looks really, really perfect when he's done.  I just wish he didn’t also do it really, really, really slowly.  And now....I must go search for a texture-splat-removing scraper.

◦

Construction With Cookies – Day 19? Already??