The rest of the downstairs items weren't too difficult to move and we had the lower floor vacated in time for the work to start on Monday. But being banished from the downstairs level for most of the week wasn't easy. I was without both my living room AND bedroom TVs, along with my DVD player, and the resulting withdrawal symptoms would probably have proved fatal if there hadn't been a TV above my desk in the loft area.
Sam and Ben now had their rooms and beds back, but Sue and I had to make other sleeping arrangements. Sam's room has a double bed, so we thought about exercising our parental manifest destiny by commandeering his bed and having him bunk in Ben's room. But Ben sleeps in a single bed, and if they tried to share it, the damage to both the bed frame and their psyches would be irreparable. We might have been able to put Sam on the floor in Ben's room if the room's dimensions weren't smaller than Sam's personal-space requirement, but Sue had pretty much decided that the fewer displaced sleepers the better. So she set up two air mattresses and one cot in the spare floor space of my office area.
We only own one cot, purchased for the express purpose of making sure that, no matter what the circumstance and location, Sue would never have to sleep at the same level as things that creep and crawl on the face of the earth. The air mattresses were necessary, if we had slept on the hard floor, the cracking of our joints would have brought the police to our door on a domestic disturbance call. Although air mattresses are better than nothing, they're not ideal. I think my pounds per square inch exceed what can be forced into an air mattress.
Every night that week we set up our sleeping arrangements, then every morning we tore them down so that we could use the office. Because of the extra kitchen work and the higher living room ceiling, the painters work ran into Thursday, and the carpet folks couldn't do their job till Friday, so we were stuck with the cozy sleeping arrangements till Friday evening. Throughout the week, we'd peek our heads downstairs every once in a while to check on the progress, or to get a breath of air that wasn't loaded with 500,000 parts per million of particulates. A lot of dust is generated during this kind of work, and for some reason, just like hot air, it all rises. In fact, it takes the stairs two at a time, then settles onto every surface and into every lung in the upstairs area. Our dust cloths had to be shaken out at the local landfill.
Although it was close to dark on Friday by the time the carpet was installed, we decided to move the essentials back into the house immediately. "Essential", however, is a very subjective term. I thought it meant the living room TV; Sue defined it as her bed. So we compromised and brought in the bed rather than face another night on potential whoopee cushions.
Although there wasn't enough time that night to bring my home theater back on line, I still wanted to get it back into the house. Sam would be at work and unavailable for the majority of the following day, and I figured I needed both Ben and Sam to finagle the giant oak entertainment center (and all the components it housed) through the front door and into its original position. So it was either get it into the house tonight, or experience an unconscionable delay of nearly 24 hours before reconnecting the household nerve center. The entertainment center was still resting on the dollies out in the garage, and I was convinced that, with my brains and my sons' biceps, we could make short work of getting it back into the house that night.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton