Once the go-ahead was given, there was a couple of weeks of planning involved. The Guy didn't do carpets, but at his suggestion, we went to a place called The Home Depot. Perhaps you've heard of it, if you're capable of driving a nail. Not being of that persuasion myself, the place was as exotic to me as the sorcerer's den where I take my car to be magically healed. I went with Sue to look at carpet swatches and participate in material selection. After learning that Astroturf wasn't an appropriate selection, I turned the job over to her and spent the rest of my time there watching a guy make keys.
Sue decided what kind of carpet she wanted, and came away with an appointment for an estimate and a carpet manufacturer's sample board, on which were glued about 24 one-inch-square swatches of different colored carpet. The idea is that you're supposed to look at this little square of material and, through the miracle of imagination, decide how your whole house will look when covered with thousands of them. She also picked out a couple of paint colors, and brought home a small amount of each paint along with a teeny tiny paint roller that looked like something you'd use to redo the interior walls of your doll-house. She was told you should pick your paint based on your carpet selection, so once she decided on the color of carpet she wanted, she went around the house with her little roller, smearing patches of her paint alternatives on the walls of each room. She tried to hold her carpet sample board up to the wall, but that exercise in frustration didn't last long... she finally clawed the little square of carpet off the board so she could hold it right up against the wall. I told her that the Home Depot enforcement arm wouldn't look kindly on her treatment of the sample board, but Sue seemed about as intimidated as she is by those "do not remove" warnings on her pillow tags and she assured me she'd glue the sample back on the board before returning it. After careful deliberation that thankfully fell short of bringing in a mass spectrometer, she made the final decision on paint and carpet.
Next was coordinating the carpet installation with the
wall and ceiling work. We were told by The Guy that it would take 3 days
to paint and repair the upstairs, and another 3 days for the ground
floor, and that, unless we had picked DuPont Dropcloth as our new carpet
pattern, the carpet should be installed after the painting.
That left two possible installation scenarios:
1. Move everything out of the house, let the painters and
carpet folks do their thing, then move everything back in. Since we
didn't have the storage facilities (or the fortitude) to make this move
ourselves, this scenario would involve hiring Bekins, giving them our
address as both the pick-up point and destination, and have them move
everything out and drive the truck around the block for 9 days until the
house was ready.
2. Do the upper and lower levels in two stages. This meant moving
everything out of the the upper level and into our garage on a weekend; having the painters come in on a Monday, do their
work for 3 days, bring in the carpet people on Thursday; then move
everything back up to the upper level before the following Monday, when
we'd repeat the process with the lower level.
We went with plan #2, without using any movers, mostly for economic reasons. Rather than hire folks to move all our furniture out into our garage, we figured it would be cheaper just to invest in a couple of defibrillators and do the moving ourselves.
So we finalized the installation schedule on a Thursday. The following Monday the work would begin. This gave us the weekend to get the upper story vacated.
As with any move, we had to get all the the
non-furniture out of the way first, so we would have the elbow
room to deal with the furniture. And a few concepts become painfully
clear once you're moving things down 14 steps and out to your garage:
1. The average home, which doesn't have to store things in glass display
cases, actually holds more stuff than the Smithsonian.
2. All structures with more than one floor should have a freight
elevator that includes the capability of traveling horizontally to the
garage.
3. An item's sentimental value is inversely proportional to number of
trips you've made up the stairs before dealing with it.
Part of the upstairs manifest is over a thousand vinyl LPs. For those of you who are still ascending life's hill, vinyl records used to be the way you brought music home. (The timeline goes like this: first there was humming, then whistling, then music boxes, then player-piano rolls, then records, then eight-tracks, then cassettes, then CDs, and now magic.) Although I've embraced each subsequent technological advance, my music collecting started with long-playing vinyl discs, accessed via a needle while spinning at 33⅓ rpm on a turntable, and because I've never gotten rid of any of them, I've now accumulated a collection that I'm very fond of, as long as I don't have to move it. There are audio snobs who hold onto their vinyl because they think that the snap/crackle/pop of a record on a turntable is somehow more "real" than music reproduced digitally. I suppose I could lie and say that it's my discriminating ear that's led me to keep all my records, but the truth is that no record company with an ounce of survival instinct would want to invest money in doing digital re-issues of most of the albums in my collection. So I have to hold onto the LPs if I want to enjoy the vocal stylings of Robert Mitchum, the Beatles as interpreted by the Hollyridge Strings, or Bach played on harmonica.
Although a 12-inch vinyl disc doesn't seem like much, if you're staring at over a thousand of those puppies, moving them is about the last thing you want to do... more accurately, for a guy in the shape I'm in, moving them would be the last thing I'd ever do. So I gave that job to Sam, reminding him that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger (a phrase whose uncertainty outweighs its encouragement).
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton