Back to Work - Floor Show - and Snow

I find it much easier to throw together a blog post while in the office than at home. Why? Because being at work requires sitting in front of the computer most of the day – ready to respond to any and all emails I receive. But – let’s be honest – it doesn’t take a genius to respond to emails, so the mind wanders (and blogs).

[Tired Skater – Friday afternoon.]

The Dude had been fighting some sort of bug all week, but he just kept slogging on. It finally caught up with him Friday and he spent the rest of the weekend just sitting around the house recovering.

[Before/during]

In addition to hosting Thanksgiving, we spent some time this weekend ripping up carpeting to expose the hardwood floors underneath. Both the Dude and Hobbled Wife have allergy problems that will be helped by removing the old, cruddy carpeting. We are lucky that our house was built in that era when the builders installed nice hardwood floors, but it was a sign of status to cover them up almost immediately with “wall-to-wall” carpeting as it was called back in the day.

[After]

When we first moved in, we removed the living room carpeting only to find beautiful wood below. We’ve put off removing the carpeting in other areas – but the recent introduction of pets and allergies have moved that project off the back-burner.

Like every domestic home repair job I tackle, this one took much longer than anticipated. We thought that we could remove the relatively small amount of carpeting on the stairs and hall quickly, and then move on the Dude’s room. Hah – I still have some staples to remove in the hall and we haven’t touched the Dude’s rooms. I’m not sure what the industry standard is, but the folks who installed the carpeting in the hall outside the bedroom/bathroom and then down the four stairs, surpassed the required nails and staples to square foot of carpeting ratio by a factor of 10. You weren’t going to slip on any loose carpeting in that hall – no way, no how. If a tornado blew through the neighborhood, leveling all the homes, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that our steps remained intact – held there by the carpeting!

Oh well, the cuts, scrapes, and calluses will heal – just in time to move onto the Dude’s room. After that – we move on to the Hobbled bedroom itself. The only thing that keeps me going is the great wood we are uncovering. Besides, the newly cleared space has a nice echo – so it seems like a bigger space that it really is.



Further weekend news – it snowed – real snow. We received about 2 – 3 inches in our neighborhood Saturday night, and into Sunday morning. It’s so blasted cold that it’s not going anywhere soon. Duke seems to enjoy it – but it sticks to the hair between his claws so he has to take frequent breaks during our walks to remove the little ice chunks.

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