Okay, it's in! The bamboo floor is laid -- got it done, in fact, by 6pm Saturday, well ahead of when I thought we would be done.
We shipped SparkyLibrarian's parents in for the turkey holiday and fed them well -- and put her dad to hard labor helping with the install, but I'm sure he enjoyed it. We also had other offers of help from friends, all appreciated, but we settled on Paul because I've worked with him a lot, and he had a tool we needed. Heh.
The hard work was clearing the room the previous week. And then the other hard work was cleaning the concrete. The final hard work was laying the bamboo, but now it is all beautiful! Or will be, as soon as we lift the remaining blue tape that was holding the boards together.
Mmmm, hardwood (er, hard grass, bamboo) floor. Lovely!
We'll have a party or something later to celebrate... probably January. November is mostly gone and December is crazy.
Oh dang. We should probably move the furniture back into place, too.
Mmmmm yum. Tis the season for holiday beers! Yay!
My fave so far is the Anchor Brewing Co. Holiday Ale -- it's pretty darned good in the bottle, but it's far far better after a long evening of blowing up watermelons and then quaffed from a pint after being served from the tap.
At the Alamo Ritz. Which pretty much cornered the market on the draft Holiday Ale for this area!
Which reminds me.. Josh! I want my comps!
Oh dear, Marla's quesadilla is burning! Back to work!
Sparky the Spare Cat has, with the onset of really cold weather (we had frost last night!), become more aggressive about dashing into the warm, warm house.
Putting in the wood floors, he found his way inside SEVERAL times, oh happy cat!
One of these ingressions (transgressions?) he came face to face with Pico (our giant, yet tiny in our hearts, cat) and Pico marched him RIGHT the heck right out the door. Yup.
Tonight, he dashed between the door and my feet as I staggered in with a handful of groceries, ran right up to Pico (his sworn nemesis; well, at least Pico swears a lot), and licked him on the head.
Pico was all kinds of confused. Ummm, hey, get out of here? Meow? Ummm... he licked my head!
By the time Pico came to his senses I had scooped sparky up and trundled him back to the cold, cold garage. Poor little guy. I put food down for him and scritched him a bit and then left him there in the cold and dark, to wait for the bandits to show up and steal the remains of his dinner.
Okay, so a SUPER BUSY week and some, just when I should have been settling down and finishing the workshop cleanup and prep for new floors.
I have NOT YET put up pictures from Halloween, but it's tops on my TODO list. Really. Soon now!
Last week, instead of putting up Halloween pictures, I helped out the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz with a promotion for the new Coen Brothers film, "No Country for Old Men". It looks awesome! I'll be doing a roadtrip, perhaps next weekend after turkey day, or may be the week after, dunno, to see it on the comps I'm getting for the promo work. I got a GREAT photo out of it, too; a pic of me taken by the Chronicle photographer who was there. Look for me next Thursday, by the way, in the Chronicle. I should have also been on TV last week, perhaps, on Fox and KVUE. Dunno.
I also understand that they are using one of the brain-blowing-out-of-gourds tests we did for the press on Wednesday as a "please don't talk" bumper.. "don't talk, or else" is the theme.
Oh, the promo itself? We, Josh (the Alamo South manager) and I, were in front of the Ritz before showtime, using a modification of my BoomStick, blowing nasty brains (banana and blood) out of watermelons.
It was fun!
Then, this weekend, we prepped the house for laying floors.
Saturday was easy enough; after a late start to the day (we needed sleep!) we finished moving everything with the help of Matt and Susan, and it was nice.
Sunday started bright and early at 6:30 am just like a work day (not on purpose, we just happened to be awake) but with nice french press coffee. About 8:00 or so, we ripped up the carpet and padding in handy little squares with a lovely curved blade in my box-knife handle. It was easy, and only took a couple of hours to strip the floor and carpet tack strips from 400+ feet of complexly contoured floor.
Under the carpet were some significant concrete cracks, and an apparent severe discontinuity in the middle of the house; either a bulge or the house is slowly splitting into two halves and falling apart. I think it's a bulge, after inspecting the outside foundation walls.
So off to Lowes to get some epoxy and seal the crack, since we don't want humidity issues under the floor.
A quick wash and we would be ready to seal the concrete!
That "quick wash" turned into four hours of scrubbing on hands and knees as we stripped up the two quarts or so of !@#$% drywall mud that the lazy-ass builders had left under the carpet. I'm not kidding; we scrubbed with TSP water (harsh!) and, after that loosened up the mud, we used a scraper to peel up double-handfulls of mud. Used 20 gallons of water, dumping the saturated 5-gallon bucket several times, each time with an eight-inch of sludge on the bottom as well.
It was brutal.
But now it's done.
Almost. The sealer went on really easy -- a gallon covering the entire floor, when it should have been four gallons. I don't understand how that worked, so we'll paint it again tonight.
Last night I dreamed I was working in a halloween haunt...
... it's been a week since SCARE closed up, though less than a week since I participated in strike, and I guess I'm almost recovered.
Now if I could just stop dreaming about it.
SCARE for a Cure was good -- we had good turnout (great turnout for a first-year haunt, which this essentially was); we made our financial goals (I believe); we scared the bejesus out of a bunch of people; and we had a boatload of fun.
After, I pulled props and materials from the site and helped tear down a wee bit; and then I completely reset my garage, which had become unusable during the month of October. I still have to tidy up a few boxes of odds and ends, but the bulk of it is re-organized.
Now, of course, we are preparing to replace the carpet in most of our downstairs with bamboo flooring. This, too, is a lot of work! Cleaning, moving furniture, wondering where the HECK we are going to put stuff...
With any luck, we'll be ready to lay floor over Thanksgiving weekend, with the help of Marla's parents.
I'll be glad once the grunt work is behind me, because I have a _lot_ of interesting projects in queue: a computer-controlled (or audio-controlled) vortex (smoke-ring) gun; improvements on the annoying damn fog chillers; the pillar of fire; and, ummm, others that evade my memory at the moment.
Plus, I need to do writing! At the very least, the ballroom dance step notes, which I swore I'd do by 2008.
In the middle of it all is a week-long trip to Germany, plus another week vacation in Oregon.