CARPET!!!!!!!!!!!!

I never showed you a picture of the trim board on the edge of the bamboo floor.



Then the carpet guys came!


Then we started moving toys into what will be a really big playroom until we finish the basement and turn it into a really big playroom, and the upstairs becomes a master suite.





What amazes me is that I know that we have so many fewer toys that a lot of families. Yet there are still so many!

counting the minutes....

until the CARPET gets installed in the morning! Only upstairs, but you'd better believe we're moving stuff in there as soon as we can!



(I realized it isn't actually finished in the picture, the trim piece at the edge wasn't installed so you will get another picture later)


we are far from finished, but this is a big step! We'll put trim in the windows soon so we can hang blinds. That evening sun from the west is blinding! And we'll install baseboards before moving large furniture.

Two years is a long time to cram everything into one living area!

3.78125

You might call it dumb luck, but we like to refer to it as careful planning.

The stairs are on the south edge of the room, and the factory-manufactured stair nosing had a groove in it. So the floor had to be installed starting at the north edge of the room, because you nail into the tongues of the flooring. But how, pray tell, do you make sure that the flooring meets up with the stair nosing in the right place? If it was off, we would have to rip down an entire course of floor the length of the entire room.

So we measured. And measured. And did some math. And measured and did math again. We laid out a few boards and figured that each joint added 1/32" to the boards themselves, which are 3.75". So we multiplied 3.78125 by the number of courses of floor (it wasn't actually that simple), and then snapped a chalk line where the first course should be nailed. And then we hoped for the best.

This is the line that we have to meet up with, see it a few inches from the edge of the stairs?



It is where the factory stair nosing ends.



So we got 3 courses away from the stairs, and stuck in some scraps, and it is going to be perfect. ...to the 32nd of an inch....perfect.




and that, my friends, is what happens when an engineer builds his own house.

floor progress

So we've been working on installing the bamboo flooring. Er, well, Frugaldad has been doing all the installing. I am really good at holding the other end of a tape measure, though. Here is the room before. Just in case you forgot, this is going to be our dining area for a while, and then we're going to put our kitchen here and turn our old kitchen into a really big dining room.



Here it is after a couple courses were nailed down.


and a few more courses


after the first day


the Frugalbaby has learned to speed army crawl...



Frugaldad took a day off work and worked on the floor some more and got to here:


We think we are really going to love this floor. And have already decided that with kids and pets, we're not going to stress when it gets dinged and scratched.

Every single hardwood and laminate floor brochure I've ever seen has a dog in it. So we had to take this one.