New Pictures

We posted some new pictures and I couldn’t resist trying out one of Picasa Web Album’s new features. If you are too lazy to actually go to the photo album you can enjoy the embedded slideshow here.

Almost Done

You might have noticed that we haven’t been posting much lately. That is because we’ve been super busy lately. Along with deadlines at work and a soon to arrive baby, we decided that now would be a good time to replace our old carpet in our living a dining room with laminate wood flooring. It was on sale at Costco and we just couldn’t pass it up. The flooring has gone pretty smoothly but there have been a few obstacles. Overall, I’d say it is about the same difficulty level of a project as tiling maybe a little bit easier. Laying tile is messier and once you let it dry you can’t take it back up, but all of the tricky elements such as cutting pieces and planning on how thing will lay out with walls and doors still apply.

The first hitch I ran into was that while I was tearing out the old floor and baseboards I discovered that the threshold of our front door had some issues. After quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to fix it, I just cut it straight down the middle and yanked it out. So I had to replace that, which is in place but will need to be secured after the flooring is done. Next, a bearing went out on my table saw so I had to pull that a part and see if I could fix it. In an effort to remove the bear in the absence of the proper tool (a bearing puller), I reverted to my roots and tried the farmer method and hit it really hard with a hammer. That actually can work since bearing are hardened steel and that can make them shatter. But it didn’t work. I guess I needed a bigger hammer. Since I didn’t have a new bearing to replace it with I didn’t try too hard though. So now I’m looking for a new motor on eBay, but in the meantime I kept working with my circular saw and miter saw. It helped that my miter saw is 12 inch rather than a 10 inch since it can cut through the entire width of a piece of flooring which is about 8 inches.

I started along a long straight wall in order to make sure that I got it to run straight with the room. I had done some measuring and had calculated that I would have ended up with a really small piece on the far wall. So I took a leap of faith that my calculations were correct and cut the entire first row in half. The planning paid off and everything fell into place. Laying the flooring went pretty well, but it was a lot of work. You have to insert the short side and then it up on the long side to slide it in. This means you have to flex the last piece so you have to have put something on the previous piece to keep it from popping out. A box of the floor works well for that. After about 400 sq.ft. I had mastered the technique as had Livy which you can see a video of in our photo gallery. The only tricky parts were two doorways on the last wall. Since the pieces pull into the previous piece you have to have room to go past and pull back together which would leave a gap. So I opted to cut the tabs off of the pieces in the doorways and glue them in. I finished up the last door which was the last tricky spot tonight and I’m letting the glue dry before the last few easy pieces in the closet. We’ll post some pictures of the finished job later but I had throw up one picture to show off my clamping setup.

You Can Call Me “Noah”

You might think that I’m referring to the biggest floods central Texas has seen in 50 years and you’d be right – in part. We are definitely wet down here – in fact, it’s the wettest year on record for Austin (more than 30 inches since January). We have had rain for the last 15 consecutive days and it is in the forecast for the next seven as well. They tell us this weekend the chances are only 20% so maybe I will FINALLY get out to take Olivia’s 18-month pictures (she turns 19 months tomorrow)! While we miss being outside, I have been extremely grateful for the lower temperatures. It more than makes up for rescheduling our play dates at the pool or sprinkler park over and over!   

But there is another reason to call me Noah today – we are 40 days from our due date and I feel as big as the Ark! So after 40 days and 40 nights, we will come face to face with our 2nd family miracle – can’t you just see the rainbow?