I'm not sure I have a blog post about one single unified and coherent topic today. So let me write a collection of short observations, just so I capture them.
--We finished the flooring install in the main living area of the house yesterday.
--When we first saw the house, around 2011, there was shag green carpeting throughout. The owners before us ripped up the carpet, but didn't install new flooring.
--My spouse was really interested in bamboo flooring, so one day last summer, we bought a piece of it from LL Flooring. We spent a fun afternoon seeing if it was as indestructible as it claimed to be. We put a lit cigar right against it--no burn marks. We tried to simulate dragging furniture across it. No damage. We took every sharp item in the house and tried to carve words into the floor sample.
--I loved our hardwood floors in our historic house in South Florida, but they were not indestructible. They would scuff and scratch and gouge--sometimes from something that made sense, like when we moved the refrigerator. But more often, I'd see a dent in the floor and have no memory of anything that would have left a mark.
--Our bamboo floors are engineered flooring, meaning they come in planks with waterproofing on one side. They are supposed to slide and lock in place easily. Some of them did.
--Is this kind of flooring more ecologically sustainable? We pondered that question last night, as we looked up at the oak trees that grow around us. How many planks would come from one tree? How long would it take to grow enough trees to provide floors for our very small house? If you've ever tried to root bamboo out of your garden, you know that it grows quickly. So on one level, yes sustainable.
--But there's also a lot of plastic and other petroleum products that go into making this flooring. So, on another level, not sustainable.
--Why did it take us so long to get this flooring installed? We bought it back in early autumn, when it went on sale. But there wasn't a great time to install it, since we didn't have an HVAC plan and we knew that new registers and vents and parts of the system would impact the floor. We knew the kitchen remodel would come later. We didn't want to rip out the kitchen too early.
--I'm thinking of all the types of flooring we've installed ourselves through the decades: peel and stick linoleum squares, parquet squares that needed to be glued with industrial adhesive to the subfloor (least favorite install so far), carpet, ceramic tile, and various types of engineered wood/laminate. We've paid someone else to install hardwood, and we've redone hardwood floors several times now, both ourselves and paying someone else.
--I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: the home repair/restoration shows on TV make it look so easy, with no clean up required at all. Grr.
--Years from now, will I remember that yesterday was also a day when a former president was found guilty of sexual abuse and ordered to pay $5 million dollars? Will that guilty verdict in a U.S. court of law make a difference? Years from now, will our floors still be in place? Will the nation?
--I often think of my presence in home repair projects as unnecessary and sometimes even not helpful. But handing each plank to my spouse so he didn't have to get up and down did save time. Getting the box of planks and unwrapping it from the plastic wrap that covered the cardboard box did save time. There was vacuuming to do.
--Smaller efforts can be essential too. Let us see if that is true on the national scene in years to come. Political scientists have told us that local actions can have a huge impact, even more so than national ones. The home repair metaphors seem to hold up for the larger home repair that the nation requires.
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