Floors by Max Lent

Here's what we did the week before last:

Remember this?


On Monday afternoon, we took almost all the yarn off the shelves in the West Wing and put it in bags.


This ran a little behind schedule, so everyone pitched in.



We put the bags in the dressing room.



On Monday night, Max worked his magic, and then we spent some time on Tuesday trying to put the yarn back.

Lots of time, in fact. It's obvious that putting yarn back is going to be slower than throwing yarn into bags, but it's not obvious how much slower--in part because it's not so easy to remember where everything used to be, and then you wonder whether that's really the best place for it, and wouldn't it be better over there? But then you'd have to find a new place for the stuff that used to be over there . . . .

Later on Tuesday, we pretty much gave up on that, and took all the yarn off every fixture in the East Wing,


and put it in bags (or not) and put it in the dressing room.

When I say "The dressing room was full of yarn," I do not mean "There was a lot of yarn in the dressing room" (although there was). I mean, "We stopped putting yarn in the dressing room when we reached the ceiling." Then we removed some, because yarn in contact with light fixtures seemed like a bad idea.

We put yarn pretty much everywhere. This is the furnace room, where the chairs are kept:


We took all the books off the bookshelves and stashed them somewhere in back:


Then, after the Tuesday night class was over, Max worked his magic again. There was an additional delay when he decided that the desk/register area would best be handled by removing the entire thing and installing under it. This meant that, on Wednesday morning, we began by sorting out which phone belonged in which jack, and which jack got the credit card terminal, and which phone had the answering machine, and many more things of that nature. But the floor looked lovely:



Then we put away some more yarn. But not the books, because it turned out that the floor in that area was too uneven for laminate flooring. Max spent part of Wednesday finding a carpet remnant instead, and Wednesday night installing it. Meanwhile, we tried to sell yarn, given that all the books in the backstock area seemed somehow to have wound up in front of everything, and we couldn't move those back yet, and Max had left some pretty big equipment back there, and no one knew where anything was anyway.

But now we have beautiful new floors, and I'm told the green dust goes away after awhile, and we didn't close even one day for it.

(In case you're wondering, we didn't choose a more, um, sane week for this project because Max is a full-time student, so we had to wait for his winter break.)