Beach Club - June 2005
This is the 'June 2005'
installment of the "Beach Club News"
Our "BIG NEWS" here on 3 June (a Friday, and only 3 days into the
new-month (this must be a record, creating a new web-page on the third
day of the new-month - USUALLY we're REALLY LATE with this stuff!
ANYWAY - the "BIG_NEWS" is our new-wood-floor... - When we bought this
house, about 18 months ago (after trying to sell our other house for
12-18 months) we should have put-in a new floor then - because this
house had "particularly" "OOOKIE" (that's a technical-term) (previously
white) carpet in 3 bedrooms and the living-room /
sitting-room. Needless to say, after another 18 months with
sometimes sick-cats the carpet's time and come and gone...
BUT _ before we engaged in this great-adventure, and had the installers
come & visit we had to protect our most valuable asset.
Ms. May, though, persevered with looking at new floor-styles - calling
vendors and all that such thing and the 'installers' showed-up
yesterday morning (they're from Miami - so that's a two-hour-drive!) -
and they laid about 870 square feet of laminate-floating-floor in about
11 hours or so... - May and
I, though, had taken up all the carpet in our two offices, and in the
living room (yesterday afternoon)...
some (brief) information on 'wood-floors' - there are three kinds of
'wood-floors' -
- solid (hard) wood (some people would think of this as 'planks' (=
expensive; over 'beams'))
- engineered hard-wood - basically a 'plywood' with a 'face or
veneer' of expensive hard-wood
- laminate - a 'plastic-laminate-(photo-litho-graph (of real-wood))
veneer over a dense press-board (what we chose for reasons noted
below (primarily moisture content in the slab))
MOST of the decision making process (if you ignore cost &
installation methodology) is based on two variables:
- over a concrete slab (then you have to worry about moisture
content in the slab (our slab was tested and our slab was too moist for
what we wanted (which was a 'more of a solid-wood' (really had a
preference for bamboo))
- over a wooden 'subfloor' (but this is not our case))
- - more details can be obtained from the huge literature and
web-site information realm...
We also found there are several methodologies to choose product,
installation methogology, vendor, etc.
- buy the product at Lowe's or Home Depot and do it yourself
- buy the product at Low'es or Home Depot and get them to help you
select a vendor to do the installation
- have someone come to your home and bring samples, write a
contract, deliver the materials and do the installation
- go to the show-room (open only on Saturday/Sunday) choose the
product - bring it home yourself (it took two loads in the Mercedes
Benz 'lugging-wagen') and then do the installation yourself
- OR choose the above method to get the 'stuff' and then have them
send their installer - (this was our method) and Mr. Ramon and Mr.
Jose who spent 11 hours on the installation were pretty good...
Ms. May's office "Before" the new wood floor
Ms. May's office 'After' the new wood floor
Bottom line - it's VERY NICE _ it'll be even nicer once we get
everything re-arranged and buy some new office-desk-furniture for Ms.
May and get that installed and get everything cleaned and put back in
place and so-on... (I'm guessing by Monday or so - Ms. May's got a
work-shop to attend this weekend at the Armory Art Center in West Palm
Beach...
some re-arrangement has already taken place in Mr. Bill's office (and
the BellSouth.Net 'xDSL' was 'up' as soon as we plugged it in!!!)
Mr. Bill's got a lot of (GIS-GPS) software books to read and some
exercises (some for Fish & Wildlife and some just for learning) to
do - so it will be busy but fullfilling weekend - as Ms. May learns new
pottery techniques and Mr. Bill learns new GIS-GPS techniques..
just a FEW great things about the new-wood floor:
- 1.) it will be much much easier to keep very clean - especially
of cat-fur (of which we have quite a lot around here, in case no-one
has noticed it yet?
- 2.) it allows you to hear your cats click-click-click-clicking
around the house - so you know where they are and which direction
they're headed in...
- 3.) one push with one-finger sends one across the room in one's
Aeron office-chair on wheels (for the first-time in a LONG TIME, I
don't think I've ever had a smooth wood floor like this one - perhaps
I'll get one of those chair-pad / floor protector thingies...
- 4.) it's much prettier than the 'oookie-form' (notice the "Triple
"O" type of "OOOkie" here) carpet we had
- 5.) it smells much better than triple-ooo oookie carpet
- 6.) it leaves us with some 'spare-pieces' and we can make things
out of that
SO - THAT'S about it for now, it's only 3 June - we
need more time to do more great things! - At this point in the
month, though, the new-wood-floor is about the only thing we have to
report... Other than the RAIN RAIN RAIN we've had for 2-3 days
now, Ms. May's rain-gauge filled-up at six inches of rain (in 3
days!)...
last updated: Friday, 03
June 2005 @ 08:27 - US-EDT, in Stuart, Florida; by: Bill Schell