Okay, this isn’t worthy of a rant so I’m not putting it in the Pit, but at least hopefully someone will find it mildly amusing. I’m sure I will someday, too, but not today!
Background: Papa Tiger is a perfectionist. I am a perfectionist, but in totally different areas. He wants to do everything himself, is not interested in input from others once he’s decided the right way to do something. I get pretty peeved when I am ignored when making what I believe are useful suggestions or coming along behind him to clean up things that I think need further work.
Current situation: We’re laying a laminate wood floor. In most of the downstairs of our house. We have started with one room, and it is Not a Pretty Picture. I’m not sure we’re going to finish the rest of the work without killing each other. It’s SUPPOSED to be an easy project, just snap the boards together. Of course, there’s lots of details we hadn’t counted on, but they really aren’t that big obstacles. But Papa Tiger Does Not Like obstacles. He nevertheless insists we need to get going on this project NOW, ignoring the fact that I have almost NO time to work on it this weekend since I’ve got a big work project that has to be completed by Monday.
To make matters even more fun, we start with the room that is currently my office. First, he decides he HAS to get going before I’ve gotten out of bed, so moves all my stuff out of the room before I have a chance to say where I want what to go. There are some things that I would prefer not to dig for. Not a chance. And then when I suggest moving the stuff that he has spread out over two other rooms into one room so I at least have a CHANCE of finding stuff, I’m being excessively critical. Hey, this is my WORK stuff, okay??? I may not be a neat freak, but at least usually I KNOW where stuff is in my mess because it’s MY mess! But HE decided where it should go, and woe betide me for suggesting his idea wasn’t PERFECT!
We manage to get the old carpeting and all ripped out without coming to blows. He gets to go out and buy himself several new toys, primarily a table saw. So far so good. Maybe things will calm down and we can proceed like civilized humans. Of course, we find there is a patch where the a previous owner tried to rip out the two layers of old linoleum that were under the carpeting, but gave up after a few square feet, so we have to figure out a way to even it out. We manage to do this, and he even grants that perhaps I am better at fine, finicky work than him and lets me do it. Things are going well.
Ha! The gods are laughing at me! He spends the evening trimming boards to the correct length – playing with dangerous power tools is always good at inducing a good mood – but then proceeds to start doing work before I get out of bed in the morning. (Are you noticing a trend here? This thread could also be titled, “When a Morning Person and Morning Slug Marry”!) He decides to get the underlayment laid out and trimmed. Well, when I come down, there’s one spot where there’s a less than 1/2" gap, but it’s easily remedied by just trimming it. So what does he do in fury at my suggesting he didn’t do it PERFECTLY? He grabs the other end of that piece and proceeds to hack at least two inches off it. Meanwhile, my original gap is still there. I have to spend half an hour convincing him that he’d done it ALMOST perfectly and I was so proud of him that I just wanted to make it PERFECTLY perfect before we could continue. That’s right, gotta stroke that ego. Grr.
Anyway, we’ve now gotten to the stage where we may actually try to LAY the damn floor. If I disappear from the boards tomorrow, you’ll know we mutually went up in flames over some tiny little detail. I can’t even imagine what it will be next, but it’s sure to be something.
Sometimes trying to save money is really not worth it, you know? :rolleyes:
