Laying Plank

Tuesday after Thanksgiving we were hoping to grout the bathroom floor, but the after letting a sample of the grout cure over night the color wasn't right. Instead we started grouting the shower. We got one wall done that night.

Then we realized that we really wanted to get going on carpeting the bedroom. It would be much easier to paint all the trim before the carpet was installed so we wouldn't have to worry about protecting anything. So we switched focus to getting all the trim in the bedroom puttied and caulked so we could finish the painting. The rest of the week was spent caulking and caulking and caulking.

On Saturday my dad came up to help us out. It didn't seem like painting trim would be the best use of his help so we started working on the flooring in the living room and dining room. My dad started tearing up the old wood floors while I worked on cleaning up the master bedroom so we could get to the flooring.

Once my dad had torn up a good bit of the old flooring we encountered the hard part - the figuring. The issue was that we already had some of the new floor installed in the new kitchen. We needed to meet up with this floor perfectly so the laminate would all click together right. The problem was that the flooring installed in the new kitchen wasn't parallel to the main walls of the living room, dining room and hallway (it was off 1/2 inch over 8 feet).

We probably spent at least an hour trying to figure out what was and wasn't parallel and how to handle it. Our options were 1) take out the appliances in the kitchen and see if we could twist the floor to make it parallel (since it is laminate it floats and isn't physically attached anywhere), 2) start the flooring against the wall we
want to be parallel with and when we get to the kitchen tear up the floor and re-lay it or 3) just keep laying the floor based off the kitchen and don't worry about parallel.

As we started playing with the layout based on the assumption that we would still meet up with the existing kitchen floor we realized that we could flex the floor quite a bit.Over 8 feet we could easily move the floor more than 1/2 inch. We realized that we could build off the existing kitchen, but flex it so that it would be parallel when it met up with the walls. So, after spending a long time figuring everything out, we actually got started laying the new floor.

We didn't get too far since there was a lot of cutting involved in getting started. But we got the hard part done and once we get back around to working on it it should go much more quickly.

For now, it's back to working on getting the trim in the bedroom finished so we can get carpet installed and finishing the floors that we started in the living and dining rooms.

We hope that during this Christmas season you are filled with wonder and awe of a God who put a plan into motion that would require Him to send His Son to this earth as a baby, born in the most humble of circumstances, for the purpose of suffering death on a cross so that we could have the opportunity to be in a personal, loving relationship with Him forever.