Monday, November 17, 2008

New Flooring


Catherine's room has new hardwood floors. Why you ask? Well, the carpet that was in her room before had been there for who knows how long (probably well before we took ownership of the house). It wasn't in great shape, but was more than able to do the job so to speak. We do have a rule about the kid's rooms though. When they leave their rooms they're suppose to close their doors. This is because they're both slightly allergic to the cats, and we didn't want the cats going into their room and getting cat hair everywhere and making the situation worse than it already was.


Well, Catherine forgot this rule at some point a couple months back and left her door open. And sure enough one of the cats went into her room, but not being content to just get cat hair everywhere they also decided to pee on the carpet. And not just a little bit of pee either. This was without a doubt more liquid than I would have believed possible to fit inside of one of the cats. And it stank. I mean let's face facts, cat urine doesn't exactly smell good to begin with, but this was beyond that. And nothing we did was able to get rid of the smell either. We tried the Nature's Miracle, water with vinegar, the works. So at that point we moved Catherine into the guest room because it didn't seem fair to have her stay in her room when it smelled that bad. We were hoping that with regular treatments over time the smell would dissipate. No such luck though. So the carpet had to go, and about this same time we found out that Catherine has several other allergies that would be exasperated by carpet. So we got hardwood flooring installed instead.


Normally that would be the end of the story. But this is joy that keeps on giving. When they installed the new flooring the stress of pounding it in caused the nails in the ceiling of the room below to loosen a bit. So those nails cracked through the plaster in the ceiling (if you look the top of the picture above you can see several holes in the ceiling now). The good news is the nails didn't come all the way out and drop onto the grand piano. That would have been really bad. But it has made it now that so that we have to touch up the ceiling at some point. I was planning on trying to take out the nails and replace them with screws thinking that would provide better support and connectivity in the future, but others have told me all I need to do is drive the nails back in and replaster and paint. Guess now I need to investigate a bit more what the proper course of action is.

4 comments:

Scott said...

Hey, we have new flooring too. Catherine's room looks just like Eddie's room, except Eddie has more princess stuff on his wall than Catherine does.

As for the ceiling... I agree with your first inclination. If you replace the nails with screws, you will never again have the problem with slippage and patching. Problem solved forever.

The contractors only use nails because they're cheap and easy.

JamesF said...

Yea, I saw on your blog where you had put in new flooring. Looks like one of the few differences is we paid someone to it versus me trying to do it myself (which would have resulted in an epic fail I believe).

Thanks for the advice about the screws.

Curt Sawyer said...

I love my cats, but the day they stop using the litter box is the day they take a dirt nap.

gaz said...

wood flooring is so much better in bedrooms than carpet. so much healthier. only our room left with carpet upstairs - can't wait for that to go at some point.