Adventures In Hardwood Flooring: a house log

Late last week we were at last able to start installing our hardwood floors at the new house. It is going well (we are getting it done with our own four hands), but it is proving to be a time intensive project – which is not necessarily the type of project you want to take on when you are short on time (we are scheduled to move in this weekend and would like to be fully done with four bedrooms and a long hallway by then – egads!). So once we are breathing a bit easier and a bit further along, we will write up a play-by-play of how it all (literally) is going down. ‘Til then, enjoy this still-dusty pic of the first room we have officially completed: our master (well, we still have to get the baseboards and quarter round in).

As much as our timeline has me sweating bullets, it is nothing compared to the Cathy-comic style perspiration that I was feeling during the first step of this project: simply getting the dang wood home. Allow me to paint sketch you a picture. Lumber Liquidators called me to say my order was in and ready for pick up. Clara was napping so Sherry stayed home with her and I ran off to rent the $19 truck from Lowe’s or Home Depot that they suggested to pick up our lumber (it was a fairly large order that certainly would not fit in our car – and renting a truck from blue or orange was cheaper than LL’s delivery service, so they recommended that). Off I went to Lowe’s, where I purchased all of my quarter-round molding for the four bedrooms and the hallway we were tackling (Lowe’s does not let you rent their truck unless you are making a purchase, but since I needed that stuff anyway it worked out well). Then I headed down the street to Lumber Liquidators.

 

Now, I knew my order would be bigger than our kitchen’s cork floor (which I was simply barely able to fit in our Altima, btw) but I was still a bit shocked when I saw the massive stack of boxes being trucked out on a forklift. Was that truly all ours? Gulp. It made me quite glad I had rented the truck….

…that is, until they began to lower the load onto the truck bed and I noticed one of the tires was squishing down a little more than the other three from the brought in weight. It certainly was not flat, it was simply a little lower than the others on air. Which was sufficient to turn me into a Nervous Nelly (not to be confused with regular Nelly). But the Lumber Liquidator folks were strong and forklifted my materials in a way that seemed to take the brunt of the weight off that tire – and we all agreed it looked okay sufficient to take it slow and drive the three short miles down the road to the new house.

Well, it turned out to be one of the longest 3 mile drives of my life. First of all, the load proved to be fairly unbalanced. Between my worries about the tire and the fact that the boxes of flooring were stacked fairly high (and not strapped together as tightly as they initially appeared to be), every time I turned I could see the boxes lean one way or the other. And this was despite taking turns at like five miles per hour with my hazards on in the right lane.

 

After a few turns I got a sense of how to shift the load back to an even-ish center, which thankfully squelched the visions that I had of myself in an overturned Lowe’s truck watching my new hardwood floor boards get strewn across the road and crushed by oncoming traffic. And since there were simply a handful of turns between me and home, I figured it would be smooth (albeit slow) sailing the rest of the way.

Then it began to rain.

 

In all of my stress about the unbalanced load, I failed to notice the storm clouds that had rolled in without any warning. Excellent. It was not simply a drizzle, it was a sudden downpour… and I had dozens of boxes of hardwood floors being protected by nothing but cardboard in my truck bed. Hello blood pressure spike!

Luckily a previous occupant of the Lowe’s truck had left a large plastic drop cloth in the truck bed (something at last went my way!) so I was able to pull off onto a side street and cover everything before it got too wet. Of course it took me a few more death-defying turns to get off and back on the main road, but crisis mostly averted.

No more than one stoplight later, the rain stopped. Stupid thunderstorm. But it was still a bit windy, so my hasty cover job with the drop cloth was now coming back to haunt me and the plastic was starting to flap loose from the truck bed. Cue a few more turns to stop and remove the drop cloth fully.

 

I had barely made it a mile from Lumber Liquidators at this point.

My pounding heart was likely visible through my rain-soaked shirt, but fortunately my next two miles were far less eventful. I soon arrived to the new house, a few hairs grayer but with my hardwoods and truck perfectly upright and intact.

Then it hit me that I had to unload the darn thing. I had fully failed to think about this step in the process. I was alone. Sherry was still with Clara at home – where it never even rained (cue me screaming “What?! Was the cloud simply over my truck?! Am I Eeyore?!”). Clearly I did not have a forklift at my disposal, so I sucked it up and began wrestling the boxes one by one off the truck and into the house. All 50 of them…

I think it took me a good hour to get them all unloaded. They were heavy (56 pounds each, I later learned), unwieldy (each one is about five feet long), and they all had to come down from the truck bed, up a few stairs and through a narrow doorway in the garage, before I could stack them in the dining room to acclimate before installation. There was no way in heck I had the energy to take them all upstairs at that point, so that would have to wait for another day. Between nearly giving myself a panic attack driving them home and then hauling 2,800 pounds of wood inside (seriously, I did the math) I figured I earned that much.

That was Clara enjoying the new flooring the day after it arrived. Here is hoping she enjoys it as much once its out of the box and laid across her floor – because that is what we are working on today. Woot!