Prisoners in the loft

Today is the day! I had it all planned out in my head....

We'd wake up. Gather everything we could possibly need for the afternoon and set up camp in the loft. The installers would show up and *Presto* my floors would lock in place smooth as butter. We'd be crafty and organized and knock out my summer project list. And at the magic hour I would walk back downstairs to my reassembled living room and whip up a spectacular batch of chicken spaghetti for dinner.

This is what really happened:

I woke up at 8:49. The installers arrived at 8:56. I grabbed cheerios, a bag of banana chips, peanut butter and some crystal light from the kitchen. I found a bag of what I thought held some summer art projects to keep us entertained. It would have helped for me to check that the sun catchers were packed with their paint, and even better a paint brush. I have a glue gun, but only one stick of glue. I brought up scrappy paper, but didn't grab the scissors. Instead of hanging up clothes, I had to lock my cat in the bedroom so she won't escape through the open front door. I've counted at least 5 houseflies that are sure to drive both my husband and the cat insane. We've done a lot of this:

And 5 hours later those installers are still sawing and banging away on the floors.

Now let me give you a little background on this floor situation. 4 years ago when we moved in this house we knew we wanted wood floors downstairs. The carpet was super industrial and had been done by the bank... not pretty and not comfy on the feet. After watching way too many hours of DIYTV I decided that we could do this project. I talked to some friends that do this on a pretty regular basis and asked for thier input. I read all the stories on-line. I stalked the flooring guys at Lowe's and Home Depot. And I chickened out. But this summer we finally decided to get it over with. After admitting to ourselves that this was not something we were repared to do on our own, we found a great deal on flooring (gotta love those 4th of July sales) and called a local company to install it for us. We did make an effort to do as much of the project as we could on our own... like ripping up all the carpet, pads, etc. We called our good friends J & T to move furniture and rip up carpet last weekend. My impatient husband moved all the furniture before they got here, but there was plenty of carpet and tack strips for everyone.

J pulls up tack strips...

And T scrapes up glue and carpet pad....

Bob gets scraping with his special gloves :)

It got pretty sweaty and dusty...

It was a dirty job....but we got it done!

I don't know if this is going to get finished today, but I will post before and after pictures when it's done. Now if I can just figure out how to get my furniture out of the kitchen...