Finally A Floor!

Way back in March, I wrote this post about tearing up my office to take out the nasty old carpet and put in a new floor.

Well, that didn't work out so good. We ended up having to spend a bunch of money on other more important things and the cash for my floor went by the wayside. But I had already taken about half of the stuff out of my room and stuck it in the spare room in boxes and heaps.

Then about two weeks ago I finally got some money and went out and bought me some self adhesive tile that I thought looked okay. It wasn't what I had originally planned, but it was good enough. And I hauled out more stuff from my office to the other room.

But I was getting mighty tired of not being able to find any of my stuff. So this weekend I decided that now was the time to get it done. Broke everything down and hauled it out. The only thing I left was my desk. This was fairly early Saturday morning. After I had read the comics and the blogs, of course.


My desk is so old and decrepit that I didn't want to haul it halfway across the house and risk it falling apart on me so I left it there and worked around it. Pulled out half the carpet then moved it onto the bare floor before I pulled the rest of the carpet up.

It wasn't quite as nasty under my old carpet as it was in the living room. But it was still pretty nasty. The padding was disintegrating and whoever had put the padding down had gotten pretty gay with the stapler.

Of course I mean that in the best possible way.

And beneath the padding we found more staples and chunks of even older padding from the carpet before that one. And bits of the previous carpeting, maybe going back two layers. I'm not sure which one came first, but we found chunks of a deep green carpet as well as maroon. We pulled staples and swept and vacuumed and pulled more staples and swept again. Then I started putting down the tile.

I was pleasantly surprised that it looked so good. And I do like the brick pattern.

It's been ages and ages since I laid any tile and I was pretty rusty at it. Fortunately the trim, once I get it repainted and put back in, will cover most of my mistakes. And the older I get the less padding I have on my tailbone. Spending most of the day sitting on a hard floor has left me sore in some different places. I'm glad my desk chair is well padded.

Saturday evening I got my desk moved back where I wanted it and my computer set back up again. The only thing left to do was a strip in front of the door and inside the closet. I left those for today.

And this morning I got up and finished the tile and spent most of the day moving the rest of my stuff back in. There's still a few piles of miscellaneous junk to sort out, but I got most of it back. And I got my comfy reading area back as well. I've been missing that.

I still hurt in all of those places and maybe a few more. But I'm happier now that I finally got my space and my stuff back in the same room. And it's opened up some more wall space so now I need to find more stuff to hang in those empty spots.

My wife designed and printed me out this cool steampunk poster a couple of weeks ago. I think I'll try to encourage more of that. It goes good with my gears and things.

And since the weather has been so miserably hot, we decided that a cold dinner would be preferable to a hot one so we splurged just a little bit and bought some fancy sammich fixin's and she made a batch of that great pasta salad made with rotini, ranch dressing, shredded cheese and chicken meat.

I made me a fat victory sandwich and enjoyed the heck out of it, even if it was almost too big to fit in my mouth.


Tomorrow I can go back to work and get some rest. Phew!