Renovations

For those of you who are following my photojournal on Facebook, our renovations are going well, though have stalled of late.

We have temporarily left the bathroom (much to my husband's chagrin) to focus on our second bedroom. See, back in September or so, our darling Ash the Cat chewed through the aquarium filter hose, and caused over ten gallons of water to leak into the room's carpet. We removed the carpet, sold the entire fish set-up to some hopefully responsible aquarists, and suffered with bare chipboard subfloor ever since.

We always knew we were going to replace the flooring upstairs, since the carpet was at least ten years old if it was a day. Wood of a sort (hardwood or laminate) were the options we had largely considered. I ordered some lovely bamboo hardwood samples from a company in Vancouver. We even went to IKEA recently and purchased laminate flooring.

Unfortunately, the floor in that room is very uneven: there is a huge dip down the middle of the room, about nine feet long, roughly four feet wide, sort of oval shaped. The reason I know it's oval-shaped is because my husband and father-in-law purchased some levelling compound from Home Depot, which, when poured, filled the dip very well.

Unfortunately (again), the levelling compound curled up around the edges when it dried. To boot, it still wasn't level enough to allow the laminate to snap together as it should. We're able to return the two unopened boxes of laminate, but not the two opened boxes with cut pieces, or the underpad foam, or the "flooring tools".

We'd heard about a sale on laminate at Home Depot, so with heavy hearts we went to look, hoping it was better quality than the IKEA crap. What we found, and what Andrew had to sell me on, was parquet flooring. Easy to install, much more flexible than hardwood or laminate, and you can measure your progress quite well since the tiles are each one square foot.

Well, it was quite a bit easier. We still had to beat the tar out of the floor to get rid of the cracked levelling compound (we used the scrap IKEA boards to fill the dip - oh, the irony!), but the floor looks beautiful.

If only we can get started on the shower again...