This was the view of our front room on Friday night. It took us 2 hours to do that little strip of flooring. Yikes! There was a definite learning curve with this project! Luckily we all found our 'groove' and made a great team. The rest of the floor was done in just a couple more hours.
This was our first major home improvement project. I've painted walls before, but never anything that required this much work. I was intimidated. I don't like power tools. They scare me. This project used saws and Dremels and air compressors for the nail gun. I'm SO glad Nathan did all the cutting and nailing!
The children disappeared for a while. After a lengthy time I noticed their absence. When I looked around for them, they surprised me by showing off a stack of boxed planks they had unloaded from the van. I was absolutely shocked that Sarah and Matthew were eager to help. They were even HAPPY to help. They giggled while they unloaded dozens of boxes. Look at the size of the stack they've created. These boxes were h-e-a-v-y. I didn't even ask them to do this. They were so wonderfully helpful. It was one of those parenting moments where I'm just so pleased with my children- they were doing something wonderful and difficult of their own initiative.
I learned a few things. Putting in a new floor is easy. Prepping the concrete subfloor is a nightmare. I really didn't like chiseling out carpet tack strips (which took hours!) and then leveling the floor with concrete filler. Sweeping it was surprisingly hard. I swept it a dozen times, and still found bits of wood or grit underfoot. I spent an entire day just getting the floor ready for the new wood. I also had a delightful acquaintance to muscles I didn't know I had. They made themselves known loud and clear as they protested being overworked.
After breakfast we volunteered to clean our church building with a few other families. This was the first time I cleaned something other than the church bathrooms. It was SO nice. In the past I always volunteered to scrub the bathrooms because I thought it would be rude to leave the hardest job for someone else. This weekend I was too tired to care about being polite, so I selfishly claimed the chapel for my cleaning contribution. It's relatively easy compared to cleaning the toilets.
Here is the finished floor Saturday afternoon. I just need to put up the base boards then we'll be done!
We rolled out one of our Turkish rugs and piled up cushions to create a sitting space while we listened to General Conference. We cuddled as we listened to inspired messages that motivated me to be a better and kinder person. Our favorite speaker shared a story about a stupid cow. Sarah and Matthew loved it. We ate stuffed manicotti, cooked squash, and pumpkin pie for dinner. We ate on the floor again. It was delicious.
It was such a perfectly lovely day! I hope you also had a good weekend.
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