The Hallway Herculean Effort
My whole body aches right now. I would collapse into bed without bothering to update my blog if it wasn't for the load of clothes in the dryer I'm waiting on. But the good news is I'm making progress on the flooring! My hallway is approximately 1/3 finished.
That's all, you ask? Why am I celebrating a 1/3 finished hallway?
Holy jamoly, putting in resilient flooring ("so easy a novice diy-er can handle it!") is not that easy. I watched several how-to videos that people had made of this job and let me tell you, they only showed the easy parts. Yes, there are easy parts. But how is it these people never bothered to show things like making the flooring fit around a door jamb? The instructions just gloss over this part: "make a template and cut around the object using a utility knife." But making a template in the first place is a pain in the you-know-what! Then I have to cut out curvy pieces of the flooring with the knife, which is excruciatingly slow and difficult work. Easy to mess up, too. A single doorway takes me about an hour. You know how many doorways my hallway has? Eight!!!!
Staggering the planks is no easy feat either. Unless you have a perfectly square room (with no troublesome doorways) it just doesn't come out even like its supposed to. The guy in the video just reviewed this part willy-nilly in about 30 seconds, without showing you the nightmare mess this leaves behind when you find out that you have cut the adhesive strips off when you were supposed to leave them on . . . or left them on and stuck things together before realizing you were supposed to take them off. Yikes!!! I hope I ordered enough extra to make up for all my mistakes.
Then there's the added fun of kids tromping through your work area and getting stuck to the planks-- or the baby crying incessantly in the background because though you've placed her in your oldest child's care, she (the baby) wants no one but Mommy.
Hey, it was a good call to remove the baseboards though, even though it was problematic at times. It makes it so much easier to know the ends of the planks don't have to be perfect-- I'll just be covering them up later. Hooray for that! (Because my edges truly are pathetic.)
Still, I can look over from the computer to the hallway and see what looks like wood flooring from where I sit. It's going to be so nice when it's done!
That's all, you ask? Why am I celebrating a 1/3 finished hallway?
Holy jamoly, putting in resilient flooring ("so easy a novice diy-er can handle it!") is not that easy. I watched several how-to videos that people had made of this job and let me tell you, they only showed the easy parts. Yes, there are easy parts. But how is it these people never bothered to show things like making the flooring fit around a door jamb? The instructions just gloss over this part: "make a template and cut around the object using a utility knife." But making a template in the first place is a pain in the you-know-what! Then I have to cut out curvy pieces of the flooring with the knife, which is excruciatingly slow and difficult work. Easy to mess up, too. A single doorway takes me about an hour. You know how many doorways my hallway has? Eight!!!!
Staggering the planks is no easy feat either. Unless you have a perfectly square room (with no troublesome doorways) it just doesn't come out even like its supposed to. The guy in the video just reviewed this part willy-nilly in about 30 seconds, without showing you the nightmare mess this leaves behind when you find out that you have cut the adhesive strips off when you were supposed to leave them on . . . or left them on and stuck things together before realizing you were supposed to take them off. Yikes!!! I hope I ordered enough extra to make up for all my mistakes.
Then there's the added fun of kids tromping through your work area and getting stuck to the planks-- or the baby crying incessantly in the background because though you've placed her in your oldest child's care, she (the baby) wants no one but Mommy.
Hey, it was a good call to remove the baseboards though, even though it was problematic at times. It makes it so much easier to know the ends of the planks don't have to be perfect-- I'll just be covering them up later. Hooray for that! (Because my edges truly are pathetic.)
Still, I can look over from the computer to the hallway and see what looks like wood flooring from where I sit. It's going to be so nice when it's done!
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