First, there was the distinctive rumble…something very large was moving ever closer to the house. I reacted swiftly, running downstairs, my heart racing. Opening the door of the mudroom I was confronted by the awesomeness of this strange, fantastic beast, the sun glinting off its intimidating mass of purple metal…but I did not run.
I wasn’t afraid; I knew this monstrous machine well, and had been waiting a long time for it to return to do my bidding…

Right. So I’m obviously no H.P. Lovecraft, but if you opened your side door and saw this, what the heck would you think?

A) Barney just barfed in your driveway
B) You are under attack by an enemy who clearly got their camo colours wrong for your particular geographic location (currently blanketed in white snow)
C) Your carpenter is here to lay the floor.

James is our contractor/carpenter on much of this kitchen addition project. He’s the one who expedited our building permits, drafted a basic drawing from our napkin scribbles and hired the right people to do the things we couldn’t – like digging large holes in the ground. Besides taking care of the foundation and framing, he’s hooked us up with a lot of great local talent (like Roger, our tile guy) and takes pride in his work. He’s got a solid reputation around here, and is in high demand.

Maybe that’s the twisted logic behind the camouflage traveling toolbox he drives. One thing about James is it’s hard to keep him cornered – he’s always bouncing around several jobs, all of which inevitably double or triple in magnitude, and if you hit an impasse (be it indecision, late delivery of materials or whatever) he’s gone like a … stealth commando or something.

While most times you’ll get to pick two out of three of the recognized ‘Good, Fast or Cheap’ attributes of contractors, with James there is only one, and it’s all Good.
We already knew this when we hired him, and that suits us fine. So far, we’ve had a fairly symbiotic relationship where our lapses in decision, reason or finances roll along smoothly with his ‘big money, hissy-fit client that changes everything only after it’s been installed, gotta-be-done-by-my-daughter’s-wedding’ type jobs.
Even though I’m sure this job pisses him off as much as any other one (nothing in this place is square, you know), we hope that he actually likes working here because we’re pretty laid back and don’t get uptight about little disasters that happen or things not moving fast enough.

We know he can run, but it’s hard to hide in that Barney-Mobile, and when we sniff him out working on another job around town (and it happens often), we take great glee in rolling down the windows to wave as we drive by and maybe saying something mildly sarcastic like, “busted” or “ahhh, now we know why you’re AWOL – working for the other* side…(*read: the side that has money to hold him to the job site)”.

He’s slippery as a fish and can’t whistle a tune to save his own life (sadly, he tries), but he’s a gifted carpenter and framer, and we’re really glad to have him working on this project. He’s worth the wait, and every penny.

My last post ended with me so excited to be about to spring into action, doing some quick demo work on the floor in our kitchen. Famous last words…

We had a very small window of time to work within, my daughter being out on a ‘play date’. John and I laboured at top speed for almost three hours, ripping up vinyl flooring and some kind of crumbly, particleboard-type subfloor that covered what, at one time, was our home’s back porch. It took a bit of finesse to pry some of the particleboard out, as the finished wood trim was already in place. At one point, John was forcing a large piece of the board out from under the wall (nailed where we couldn’t get at it) by rocking it back and forth, and snapped off a small bottom corner of the doorway’s plinth in the process. Fortunately, I noticed it right away and found the piece before it was sucked into oblivion. The piece had broken off cleanly, and with a little wood glue and tape, the doorway was good as new. We were a bit more careful after that. John also patched the holes in the floor where the old heat registers had been located.

While he was busy with that, I had the glorified task of removing the flooring nails that remained sticking up from the floorboards…and there were quite a few of them as you can see.

This part of the job was critical though, because our kid refuses to wear shoes and never walks, but runs around the house with reckless abandon. We knew there would be no way to prevent her from examining every inch of bared wood in her bare feet. I’m a meticulous sort, so this type of thing is actually right up my alley. Every single flooring nail was removed and the floor vacuumed before she arrived home.
Deirdre got to participate in our last task of the day, which was doing a ‘silly walk’ (her own words, but so Python-esque I had to kiss her for it) across every inch of the newly exposed floorboards to find out where they squeaked, and placing screws wherever we found one.
By the end of the day, we had a squeak-free surface that was ready to accept new flooring.

By the end of the next day, we had one houseblogger in excruciating pain, dealing with the return of her dreaded arch-nemesis, the Herniated Disc.

I’m feeling much better today, after almost a week of lying prone on my back and living off muscle relaxants, an anti-inflammatory, pain killers and ice cream. At least I can sit in a chair for a few minutes without wincing. Don’t you just hate it when old injuries come back to bite you on the arse?

Demolition, while kind of fun at the time, is one of those ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ renovation projects. It’s the lousy job you don’t have to pay someone to do if you’re naïve enough to go for it yourself. So we’ve saved some money, and now I can say in all honesty that I’ve busted my back working on this place.
I’ve also discovered that whether you choose the DIY route or hire someone to do the dirty work for you, the bottom line is you’ll probably pay for it, either way.