Surviving Round Two

New to me bookshelf

My laminate floor has been reinstalled and glued and so far, no creaks.  Hopefully (all fingers and toes crossed) our new floors will be fine and the faulty creaky floors that were installed last year will soon be nothing but a distant memory.  I still love the pattern we chose and it definitely stands up to Buddy's sharp claws so hopefully it was only a bad batch that was initially installed.


I hate having tradespeople in my home.  We work and live here and have a dog and it makes our lives a living hell.  Hubby has tried to continue to work but I cannot as right now I should be editing film for our course we are creating but that can't happen with people in the house.  The floor got completed at 5pm last night (one day as the floors were already prepped, they just had to remove the existing laminate) and the plumber came this morning to reinstall our dishwasher and waterline on the fridge.

In about an hour the final trades guy will be here to paint and caulk the baseboards and then we can put the living room and dining room back together and finish cleaning sawdust and board bits off the floor.  Thankfully Buddy is older now and not quite so interested in eating everything he finds on the floor.

I have been looking for several months for a bookshelf for my bedroom to store some antique books I collect and finally found the right piece on our Facebook 24 hr bidding site.  I paid $81 which is more than I thought I should but after seeing a lot of poor quality pieces this one is just perfect and matches our modern bedroom furniture which is black with silver handles.  I would have liked an antique piece but again, nothing that would match any of our existing furniture showed up.    New ones were at least twice as much so in the end I am happy with the price.

The benefit to completely ripping your house apart to have 75% of the flooring redone is the huge amount of cleaning you have to do to put it together.  Considering my oldest stepson is coming to visit next week I will do no more cleaning prior to his arrival than what gets done today.  The bathrooms will get a quick wipe and that's it.  Not that he cares what it looks like but when he is here we are taking a couple of days off to go have some fun with him.

My American relatives are not coming to visit as their passports expired and they couldn't get new ones in time without spending a fortune so they have decided to visit the Oregon relatives instead.  Fine with us, life is too busy to do too much visiting.

By the end of today life should hopefully resume as normal.  We have decided to splurge and have supper at Costco as have hardly any groceries due to eating down everything in the fridge/freezer combo so it could be shut off.  I cleaned the fridge prior to the re-floor so it is spotless and now no need to clean it for at least several months.  Renovations are kind of like really stressful Spring cleaning - lots of pain and the end part is the reward.

We have a couple of jobs in this reno that we haven't completed, not sure when we will feel like it either.  We would like to frame our bathroom mirrors as they are builders stock glued directly to the wall.  There is also some painting of a beam over the garage door that needs to be done.  Nothing urgent though, at this point I just want a bit of normal life.