Tales of Home Improvement

July 20, 2011 on 4:26 am | In uncategorized | No Comments

I got up at 4:30am to take Leslie to the airport. She’s going on a two week vacation to California. Spending a relaxing fortnight in a beach house. When she gets back, all tanned and relaxed, she’s going to become my live-in thumb wrestling opponent. My house needed some serious improvement before anyone could feel like they didn’t need a shower after being here for more than five minuets, and I thought I would start with the kitchen, since she is a girl and that is where she will be spending most of her time.

the floor from hell

First step is pulling up the carpet.Then scraping up the glue that is left behind. This led to the discovery of the yellow linoleum that lay beneath.

Since there is a good chance this flooring contains asbestos I will be leaving it be. Not so that I can practice my freestyle disco moves on a period correct dance floor but so that it may lay undisturbed and my cell phone, computer monitor and toothpaste will be the only things giving me cancer.

Simple green left to soak on the carpet glue gets the difficult stuff. The liquid + glue goop that results from this is a level of nasty that is difficult to convey with either pictures or words. It’s like cleaning up after a roller coaster full of kids puked in my kitchen after eating breakfast bowls from Spangles.

I hope simple green, like soilent green, is made from people (preferable the people who built this house)

Once the heavy stuff is scraped up it’s on to using a 3″ putty knife to scrape up the rest. This part would have been torturous enough by itself, but to compound my misery I had terrible gas as a result of the heat and the sushi I ate last night. I’m hot, I’m sweaty, I’m squatting down, scraping up disgusting slop and farting uncontrollably. I curse the fact I was ever born.

At this point I must have blacked out from a combination of exhaustion and shock. When I came to I found myself laying on the floor, curled up in the fetal position. The low hum of the ceiling light complimented the ringing in my ears. The light was soft, soothing me. I could take no more. I was letting myself slip into the beyond. There was too much that still needed to be done. I needed to patch the holes in the linoleum, fill and level and clean the floor and then figure out the layout and finally put down the tiles. But then I remembered something. That I am a wizard. So I cast a floor-be-done spell.