Day 3 of R&R

So for today's span of rest & relaxation while the kids were away, we at least managed to not rip out any existing components of our home. That's about as vacation-like as I can manage to make this sound.

This morning, I awoke with a nasty headache at 8:38 and the nasty realization that I had an 8:45 meeting. I was only six minutes late.

When I got home around 11:30, I was too tired to do much, so I let Dowlan put in two of the threshold moldings while I moved more furniture around. (Please do not point this out to me in a few days when I am complaining of back pain.) We got the room finished off and began on the living room.

Two years ago, when we remodeled the girls' room, we had a large piece of green carpet in relatively good shape. Being the ghetto-fabulous repurposers that we are, we moved furniture out of the way and sat that piece of green carpet on top of the worn and stained carpet that covers our living room floor. It was a shame to throw out perfectly good carpet when we had perfectly not-good carpet still in use, right?

Well, two years later, that carpet is fairly covered in Kool-Aid and grape juice stains. (And I think it's worth pointing out that, in all this time, only two people have noticed the carpet-on-a-carpet scam we had going there.)

So we are going to use the piece of carpet from our room to do that again. We began to move stuff around, realized we were tired and hungry, and went to Lowe's to return stuff, then ate pizza in the front of Sam's Club. (Don't knock it as a date option--it's great pizza and our total for two people was just under five bucks.)

Then I came home and crashed for about an hour before going to work.

At 8:30 this evening, I got home from work. After a two-hour nap, we got to work moving everything out of the living room so that we could remove the top layer, steam clean the bottom layer, let it dry out overnight, lay down the next layer in the morning, steam clean it, let it dry all day while I pack and move stuff back in to the living room before I head to the airport.

Yeah. That would have worked if our steam cleaner were, say, at our house instead of, say, in the back of Laura's car.

Plan B--vacuum it really, really well--would work if, say, our vacuum didn't smell like burning rubber when turned on.

So we used my hardwood floor cleaner to at least work it over a bit. Once that was done, I had it in hand, plugged in and filled with water, so I might as well keep going. I did the entryway and the kitchen, going so far as to remove the drawer underneath the stove and clean under there. Then, of course, I had to clean out the inside of the drawer and get on my knees and scrub that little crack where base molding meets flooring that nothing can quite clean, which leads to cleaning that two inches you can reach in under the stove, dishwasher and fridge and, might as well, the refrigerator door (inside and out).

It's a disease.

Dowlan has given up on me. He has made a sandwich and pulled the desk chair into the living room to watch on tv whatever comes after Letterman, hoping no more orders come his way. His normal offer of help with the dishes is nowhere to be found and he suggests it would be better to put up the last of the tools tomorrow in daylight.

*scoff*

Remembering that I have another 8:45 appointment tomorrow, I wonder if he might be right . . . and head to bed, not to sleep, but to blog.

But I have to get to bed soon to be ready for day 4 of R&R . . . .