Say Hello to our New Floor!

This past week saw major progress on one of the aspects of the construction we decided to do ourselves - the flooring. We finally found some flooring we wanted at Rona last Sunday and Monday morning Greg and I rented a cargo van to deliver it and begin the installation. Things got off to a rough start though when the van, after being loaded with a few things at our house, wouldn't change gears when we got on the Highway in Orleans, on our way to Rona. I got off at the next exit and took it right back to the car rental outlet. The good news is they did have another van available and ready to go. The better news is they gave me free rental for the day. We eventually made it to Rona and loaded 27 boxes of laminate flooring and underlay and made our way to the cottage without further incident. After unloading our materials, we worked for about five hours and made good progress, almost covering half of the front room, making it to where the hall begins.

Then Barb and I went up on Thursday morning to continue the task, but we didn't get to it until Friday morning. Our contractor was there on Thursday to cut the baseboards to size for us and attend to a couple of other small issues. Meanwhile, we worked at re-assembling our Adirondack chairs. We had stained them and were replacing the arms. They're great to have by the campfire. The weather was great over the three days we were there. We were able to, and in fact, needed to swim each day. After hours of hard work, diving off the dock never felt so refreshing. And we almost finished all the flooring in the front room. Our Power box 800 (from Canadian Tire) is proving to be very dependable. I used it to power a jigsaw to cut the flooring. Otherwise, I would have had to rent and run a generator or make all these cuts with a hand saw, which would mean we would only have about one tenth of the work done. Covering the unfinished floor really helps warm the place up and is much more comfortable to walk on. Just an hour or so more and we'll have finished the front room. We'll do the bedrooms a little later in the fall.

Here it is: