Getting old is teh suxxorz

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

After much delay, the middle bedroom finally has a new floor. I’d put Ikea wood veneer flooring in the little bedroom a few years ago with good results. This time I used their higher-grade flooring. If you’re not familiar with this kind of flooring, this is how it works: One long edge and one short edge have tongues, and the other two edges have grooves. The tongues have contours on them so that they lock into the grooves. On the cheaper flooring I used before, it was a simple matter to lock the pieces together. This time it wasn’t so easy.

First, the ‘Tundra’ planks did not lock together along their long edges as easily as the planks I used earlier did. Second, instead of just camming the short edges in, they needed to be tapped (pounded) in with a block and hammer. This and the extra manipulation slowed down the process considerably.

Now here’s the thing: I destroyed my knees in high school. I can also stand to lose an ounce or two. The room is 161 inches long, so it requires just under three planks per row. Lots of getting on the floor and getting up again to get a new plank, measure them for cutting (edges were staggered, so alternate rows required two cuts), fitting the new planks in, going to one end to make sure the tongue on the short end aligns with the groove, going to the other end to hammer it in while stretching to keep the other end aligned… Up and down, up and down.

What I thought would be a three-hour, one-person job ended up taking like eight hours. And I had to get the roomie to help me. By the end I was hot, tired, and sweaty. I was vocalising my checklist on every plank. (‘This end s the tab, this edge has the tab. It goes in this way. I want to keep this, and cut off that.’) I hadn’t eaten all day, except for a few bites of leftover ham and a dinner roll for breakfast, and my thought processes were slowing down.

(FWIW: I cut the tab off of one end of a plank once. Another plank turned out to not fit quite right – which I didn’t notice until I’d already put in another row. And at the end when I was ripping planks to go against the opposite wall, I cut off the wrong edge of one plank.)

Today I’m a bit stiff. It sucks to get old. At least the floor looks nice. Now I just have to do the moulding.

2

At least you got the floor installed! Some friends of ours, a lesbian couple, recently put a similar floor in their second bedroom. They were having problems with it and invited us over for dinner/to look at it (they’re 45 minutes away, in Worchester) and we tried to put it together, too. It was almost impossible to get all the pieces snug in both X and Y directions. They’d bought a special piece that fit onto the tongue/groove part and let you hammer it without damaging the boards, but even with that it was hard. We finally gave up.

A couple of weeks later we saw a post from one of them on Facebook asking if anyone knew how to install that type of flooring. I think they were going to pay someone to finish putting it in.

3

I have one of these, left over from the first floor.

4

Beats the alternative.

5

Ayup.

6

So the cheaper flooring would be a better idea?

7

Might be if you have trouble getting up and down a hundred times. But the Tundra definitely looks better.

8

This was your big mistake. Every time I’ve worked a physical job or helped out a tradesman I’ve noticed they’re very particular about their smokos and lunch breaks. As a builder once said to me “You’ve got to feed the machine”. After two or three hours you need to stop, have a cup of coffee or tea and a bite to eat and then get back to it. Otherwise you get tired, make mistakes and lose your patience.