STUCK IN REMODEL WITH YOU - conclusion
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As you may recall, we were now at the point in the remodeling process where the upper story had been completed (including returning all the displaced furnishings) and we were starting phase 2: emptying out the ground floor.
Our La-Z-Boy furniture consists of five huge modular reclining chairs. Two of them connect together to make a loveseat; the other three, along with a couple of arm units, fit together to make what one might call a sofa (in the sense that one might call a HumVee a "buggy"). These things were too big to fit through our front door. When they were delivered, they were lifted over our back yard fence and brought in through the sliding glass doorway that serves as a rear entrance to our living room. I'm sure that the guys who delivered these padded monoliths soon wound up in the same support group as the guys who delivered my desk.
In retrospect, I guess, it says a lot about your self-image if you want to buy yourself a piece of furniture called a La-Z-Boy. Obviously, a person who wants to sit in a La-Z-Boy, almost by definition, doesn't want to move one. But necessity overcame nature and we managed to get the chairs out into our backyard patio. In the place where my chair had been, there was a pile of surplus popcorn that, over the years, had managed to miss my mouth and had fallen through the cushions, but a rented earth-mover made short work of that. We covered the La-Z-Boys up with a bunch of plastic and stared wistfully at them for the week they were out there.
Other than the La-Z-Boys, a couple of end tables, and a couple of cabinets that house my DVD collection, the entertainment center is the only other piece of furniture in our living room, and it's the most imposing piece. It's also made of oak (I'm thinking balsa wood for any future furniture purchases) and houses our 50" TV and all its accoutrements: amplifier, TV receiver box, dvd player, and more DVDs. Through the back of it runs enough cable to wire up CNN. Its weight is about half that of my office desk (in other words, about 7 tons) and it rolls on 6 casters of the quality found on your average Fisher-Price vehicle. My plan was to disconnect the wiring, remove the TV, and roll the whole piece and its remaining contents out the front door and into the garage.
This operation ran smoothly until we hit the speed bump that is our front door threshold. The casters wouldn't just roll over this imposing strip of metal, so Ben had to lift one end of the cabinet while I nudged the other in order to make any forward progress. We got the first set of casters over the hump, but we had to lift it again for the middle set, shifting most of the cabinet's weight to the casters now resting on the concrete walkway outside the house. That's when we blew a tire. One caster let out a death scream and shattered into little pieces that were later gathered for a tasteful closed coffin service honoring one who fell in the line of duty.
Now we had a giant block of oak plugging up our front doorway, see-sawing back and forth on the threshold, and we didn't have access to the small regiment it would take to lift this thing off its casters and muscle it on out to the garage. So after having a good cry, I made my way out our back door, over the tarp-covered La-Z-Boys, through our back yard gate, and hopped into my car for a trip to Costco, which happened to have household dollies on sale. Costco features a lot of seasonal merchandise, and apparently this was the season for moving objects that are not meant to be moved. The dollies were reasonably priced, but frankly, Costco could have demanded the deed to my house and sealed the deal. Other than my wedding ring and the OB/GYN bills for my two sons, this was the best purchase I've ever made.
When I got back home, Ben was still faithfully balancing the cabinet at our front door, so we slipped one dolly under the outside end, rolled the thing forward, slipped the other dolly under the other end, and managed to postpone our end-zone victory dance until we had successfully wheeled Godzilla into the garage. When all the moving was eventually done, I placed the dollies in the Hall of Fame section of my garage, next to the screwdriver attachment for my power drill and that gadget that lets you reach behind furniture to pick up stuff. Later that day, I picked up a replacement caster at Lowe's (which is Home Depot with everything orange painted blue) and set it aside, making a note to myself to install it sometime later that week, after I had regained the full use of my arms and legs.
(A brief aside: I know the question you're all asking: Chuck, why didn't you and Ben just use the Forearm Forklift, those amazing carrying straps you see advertised on TV that allow two people to move nuclear-reactor-sized appliances using the magic of leverage? As a matter of fact, I have a set of these, and we did attempt to use them. As usual, though, the TV commercials leave out a couple of important facts: 1) they're not much use in moving things downstairs, where the guy on the lower end of the load can easily be leveraged into oblivion by the weight shift; and 2) you still have to have forearms like Popeye in order to muscle any item that was manufactured from a grove of oak trees.)
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.
As you may recall, if you're not me, I had broken a caster on the entertainment center, purchased a replacement caster, and made a note to myself to repair the damage. Apparently, I didn't get the memo, because it wasn't until I went back out to the garage with Ben and Sam to roll the cabinet up to the front door that I remembered that I needed to take the old broken caster off and replace it with the new one while the cabinet was jacked up on the dollies. I also didn't remember Thornton's Law of Home Projects: Anything that brings you into a hardware store will ultimately require at least two more subsequent trips. This law holds true even if you just stopped in to use the bathroom, and it was holding true in the Curious Case of the Cabinet Caster.
Once I remembered that I had to replace the broken caster, I couldn't remember where I had put the new caster that I had purchased the previous week. I was pretty sure it was in the garage somewhere, but the garage was pretty cluttered up at the moment, and trying to pinpoint a specific item was like trying to locate Waldo without his shirt and cap. After searching for a while, I realized it would be quicker to just run down to Lowe's and get another caster.
The place was pretty much deserted; I'm sure most people are doing something on Friday nights that doesn't involve bolts or spackle, and I was grateful that there were enough hapless schmoes like me to make it worth Lowe's while to stay open past 7 pm. I breezed in, picked up another caster, breezed out, and was soon back home and discovering that I had picked up the wrong kind of caster. I really should have removed the broken caster first and taken it with me for comparison, but that would have involved a level of foresight and common sense that, let's face it, has eluded me most of my life.
So I made another trip to Lowe's, where they were now treating me like Norm at Cheers, and came back with the appropriate caster. It was all downhill from there (not literally downhill, mind you, or we'd still be chasing my runaway entertainment center)... I replaced the caster, we rolled the cabinet back up to our front door on the dollies, scooted it over the threshold, off the dollies, and into the living room. No casters exploded, and we were able to nudge it over our new carpet and into position. Then we crawled to our respective beds, which for the first time in 2 weeks were all simultaneously in the correct rooms. After a week on an air mattress, it was great to be back in a real bed. I could actually shift my rear end without causing my feet to elevate.
The next day I reconnected all the components of my home theater, and soon we were back to clocking 20% of all kilowatts consumed in the greater Los Angeles area. By the end of the day, we had all the living room and master bedroom furnishings back where they belonged. And we all lived happily ever after.
Just kidding. The kitchen still wasn't finished. But here's a picture of the living room, with things back to as normal as they ever get around our house.
The kitchen looked pretty good, with a new floor, new coat of paint, redone cabinets, and new lighting, but we still had to replace the wooden countertop. That involved another contractor (through Home Depot, of course) and until we could get that done, most of the contents of the kitchen (table, chairs, oven and range, contents of the lower cabinets) had to remain out in the garage. On the positive side, the refrigerator and microwave remained inside and in working order, so the Thornton family didn't end up running in the same circles as the Donner party.
The process of getting a new counter is a little involved. First you have to pick out the material. Sue decided on some sort of engineered stone. I would think the term "engineered" would have negative connotations (I think of Spam as engineered meat) but apparently it's a desirable category of countertop material with all sorts of colors and exotic brands to choose from: Zodiaq, Viatera, Cambria, and Silestone, for example. I forget what Sue went for, but it was one of the ones that didn't sound like a lifestyle prescription drug for men.
Next you have to schedule an estimate. Some guy comes out with a tape measure and gathers information, then returns to Countertop Central to noodle the figures before delivering an estimate a day or two later.
If you accept the estimate and pay some money, then you schedule the "real" measure. That means a few days later, a "real" man comes out and rips out all your old counter. Before he'll do that, though, all the faucets and plumbing from the kitchen sink, including the garbage disposal, have to be removed. Since this was essentially demolition (my specialty), I figured there wasn't much expertise involved and I could handle it myself. I extracted the faucets with the finesse of a frontier dentist, but the garbage disposal was a tough nut to crack, and I finally had to resort to downloading the installation manual and reading it backwards to figure out how to get the thing out of there.
Once you're ready, another guy comes out and lays down plywood where your old counter used to be, ensuring there's a level surface on which your new counter will be installed. Here's what it looks after the guy does his work:
The bucket under the sink is to address a slight drip that magically appeared after I yanked the plumbing out. It was either that or keep Sam down there with his finger in the dyke. We also drop our spare change in it, like a wishing well. The proceeds go toward the new counters.
Our old countertop was so ugly that the plywood was an improvement and we were tempted to stop right there. But as the old saying goes, in for a penny, in for a zillion pennies, and besides, the plywood doesn't have any holes cut out for the sink and faucet. After this guy finished the plywood prep, he used a laser gizmo to accomplish the "real" measure, meaning the one they'll use to manufacture your actual countertop. Then this guy also returned to Countertop Central for another strategy session before we got a call to schedule the actual countertop installation, which was about 2 weeks out.
Until that time, we were washing our dishes in the bathroom sink (my conservation-minded suggestion that each of us take a dish and our favorite utensil into the shower every day was quickly rejected by Sue). We didn't move the range back in because we would have just had to move it out again when they installed the "real" counters, so our dining choices were: a) microwave meals; b) stuff right out of the refrigerator; c) standing plaintively outside the neighbor's window during mealtime; or d) eating out. We chose "d" most of the time, but keep in mind that for our family, "eating out" just means that we're eating food that was paid for at the same place it was prepared. A lot of the time, we're getting it and bringing it back home because it's tough to find a good place that lets you eat in front of a TV, and those that do won't let me assume command of their remote control.
Now that we had the new carpet, eating in the living room took on a whole new dynamic. Allowing scraps of food to hit the carpet is now punishable by a slap up the side of the head by Sue, and if you drip or spill liquid, she's got a cattle prod ready. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but there is a lot of pressure presented by the new flooring, and my heart pounds every time I eat in the living room (or anywhere, come to think of it... maybe I shouldn't wrap everything in bacon).
After a couple of weeks, the guys came out to put in the countertop. They set up shop in our driveway with sawhorses and power saws to do all the necessary customization. They plugged their saws into an outlet in our garage that apparently was connected to the same circuit as all the stuff in my home office, because we kept losing power up there anytime their saw blade exceeded 2 rpm. At first I thought I was having a series of mini-strokes till I realized it was the surrounding 5 tons of electronics constantly rebooting. We finally shut everything down till they were finished. The surrounding houses probably experienced a power surge that exploded all their light bulbs, but I'm told these things aren't traceable, and as soon as we powered the office back up, the rest of the community was back to its customary brown-out level.
The next day the plumber came out to install the new faucet and new garbage disposal. The old garbage disposal was a little worse for wear after I extracted it, and we were afraid if we had it reinstalled, the first time we turned it on would result in some sort of warp core breach that would take out the whole kitchen. So we got a new heavy-duty-mega-super-turbo disposal that's guaranteed to mulch tap-water down into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The plumber also hooked back up our range at Sue's request. She's convinced that whatever pipes I touch lose their integrity, and although I'm trying to disprove that theory, I wasn't prepared to put it to the test with natural gas. Now that the plumber's left, things look like this:
So it's pretty much finished, though we're still trying to decide if we want to put a new dinette in there, or go with a blanket for a picnic motif. But the rough stuff's over, and the moral of the story is not to be discouraged by home improvement projects. There's always a light at the end of the tunnel. I'll admit that sometimes the light is from an oncoming train, but in this case the source of the light was in the eyes of my wife. As the MasterCard people would say: Priceless.