Archive for March, 2007

In light of recent events in my life, this quote (not necessarily truly direct) from an episode of CSI.

“Have you ever done the right thing and then felt guilty about it, anyway?”

“Sure. It sucks, doesn’t it?”

Today, while having lunch at Wendy’s, we saw an older gentleman who reminded us both of our childhoods. Lori’s grandfather and Emil’s dad and grandfather were all carpenters.

The man was dressed in a long-sleeve denim shirt, an older style (now, we call them “trucker” style) ball cap, and blue/white striped overalls. He was a little smaller than Lori’s Papa Cleo, but was shaped the same. It was a definite throw back in both time and culture….to a time when even Bryan was a smallish-sized town.

A while back, we saw a demo of the protoype for this alarm clock. Since we have to have multiple alarms to get to work on time, it cracked us up. I wonder what the cats would do to/with it…?

http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/20/devious-clocky-hits-the-market-ready-to-roll/

(While Lori was at a BV QueSt meeting to determine how much money the GAYla raised) Emil finished the hallway!

We only have one tiny closet and some transition pieces left to do! Once we have that and all the sealant on the guest bathroom, the 2/1 side of our upstairs will all be Pergo!! It’s soooo nice to walk on!

Guest bath: first coat of sealent is on the perimeter. It takes 24 hours to set before we can do the 2nd coat, another 24 for the second coat to set before we can reinstall the toilet and trim the room, and 72 hours to cure completely. So, we’ll work on that room each evening this week.

Hall and closet: planned and partially laid. Since so many doors join this “room”, it’s taking a very long time. We stopped about 1/3 of the way down and will work on it again when we can finish it all, so we don’t accidentally ruin the exposed transition tracks at the thresholds. The good news is that Emil found a very good way to secure the end at the top of the stairs where the Pergo meets the carpet that will remain in the house (until we get around to doing the stairs and living room.)
So, we fell a little short of our hopes, but, more than anything, we just ran out of steam.

Bonus: Indi has adjusted well to being left “alone” downstairs while we are upstairs or in the garage. He only ruined one pillow and ate waaaaay too much batting.

Now, it’s time to tackle a couple of small computer projects for BV QueSt and As You Wish and then relax.

We took a well-deserved break to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with our Aggie Bar Crawl friends. After dinner at Fitzwilly’s, we met up with the group at Mad Hatter’s. We bar hopped a little, but mostly just talked and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Emil, McKinley, Matt, Justin, and Georgia
Our favorite quote of the night occurred during a conversation about “men in uniform”:

Georgia: You know who I think is hot..?…”airplane drivers.”

Lori: “You mean, pilots?”

Emil: “Sit down, airplane driver!”
(At Aggie games, the fans yell “Sit down, bus driver!” to the other team’s coach when he’s fussing at the referees.)

Justin was quick to her rescue, though. He pointed out that true geniuses forget the simplest of things.

Yeah, she’ll never live that one down.

Well the guest bath is laid, but not sealed or trimmed. The craft room is trimmed. We unloaded all the things from the master suite that we don’t use on a daily basis (of course, this still leaves a lot, like closet shelving units that reach the floor.) We ripped all the carpet, padding, tacks, and staples from the hall and have it prepped for floors.

Day 5 gols: seal the bathroom, lay Pergo in the hall and closet, trim the hall and closet.

We changed our plan a bit for today. Since we needed two people to place the floors in the craft room, and since we can’t fit two people in the bathroom, we traded those.

The craft room is finished except for some trim. (We bought all that was in stock a couple of days ago, so that may just have to wait.)

The bathroom is about half laid. That process is much slower not only because of all the cuts, but also because each row has to be glued. And, once the Pergo is laid, we’ll have to seal the entire floor to prevent water seepage.

Of course, we had a lot of help today from the feline members of the household. They worked hard holding down their “woobies” on our bed.

Day 4 goals: lay Pergo in the guest bath, seal guest bath, load craft room leaving access for missing trim, prep hallway, eat a real sit-down dinner, drink green beer.

Well, we laid a lot less floor today, but we still made very good progress. After discovering we purchased the wrong thickness of sub-floor material for the guest bathroom (water damage in that room had swelled the floor, so the thickness was deceiving), we made yet another trip to the hardware store. Emil spent the majority of the day working on the sub-floor in the bathroom and made it level.

Lori spent most of the day moving stuff from the craft room to the guest bedroom (since all the guest stuff was in the craft room, this took a long time). She also took advantage of that time to cull some of our book collection–since quitting school, she no longer has a need for so many text books–and a large part of her magazine collection. She resisted the temptation to sort through things as she was moving them from one room to another. It looks like it won’t be long before we have another garage sale.

This evening, while Emil started cutting Pergo to fit around the toilet, Lori stripped the craft room of it’s carpet, padding, carpet tacks, and other nasties!

Day 3 goals: Pergo, trim, and glue guest bath, finish final prep on craft room, Pergo craft room.

With a good set of prepping under our belts (Sunday, we planned and shopped. Monday and Tuesday evenings, we prepped and started learning how to work with the flooring materials), we had a very productive first day of installing new Pergo floors on the top level of our house. The guest room is now finished–complete with trim–and is ready to load back in! We also started on the guest bath and discovered some hidden water damage, so we have begun tearing out the sub-floor.

New Toys: Dremel set (with scads of accessories), compound miter saw, and knee pads!

Day 2 plans: load the guest room and craft room contents into the guest room, replace sub-floor in guest bath, lay Pergo and trim the guest bath, and prep the craft room. If we can reduce the number of trips needed to Lowe’s, we might just make it!