The Floor, Finally

As promised before, here are pictures of the new floor in the dining room. First up, we've got the floor as it used to look. I'm sure at one point the hardwood looked nice, but it was scarred, and shrunken and scratched, and there would really have been no way to restore it.

Here I am with my father-in-law on day two of the installation. Day two went a lot faster than the first night did. We moved the table out into the living room, and moved the smaller furniture around as needed. Once we got the feel for how the tongue and groove fit together, it wasn't too hard.

Of course, once we got started, Logan had to test it out and see how well his cars would roll across the new floor. He was quite satisfied.


At the half way point I suggested we might just leave it as is. It could have been like the dining room of the Batman villain Two Face. Brandi wasn't too keen on that idea.

And finally on the day before Easter, two hours before we had to go to a birthday party and several hours before my family was due to arrive for dinner the floor was done.

Ta Da!

Busy Weekend

Last weekend was a busy one, and I feel like I need a weekend to recover from the weekend. Home improvement will wear a guy out I guess. I spent Friday walking a local trade show. There was a Mary Kay convention/recruitment drive going on next door (no, I didn't sign up) and there were at least four light pink Cadillacs in the parking lot when I left.

Friday night was spent painting the ceiling in the dining room. It wasn't a terribly difficult task. I put up one and a half coats of paint and now the ceiling looks a lot better. It took a little getting used to the edge tool, so there'll be a little touching up at the top of the wall, but we had to touch up toddler marks anyway.

Saturday and Sunday I had to work all day and when I wasn't doing that I was installing our new faux-hardwood laminate in the dining room. I started the project Saturday night later than I wanted to because of all the prep-work that had to be done. There was a bit of a learning curve on Saturday night, mostly because I didn't take the time to think things through as far as where I cut the laminate. I was using a miter saw, but that was pretty noisy and it was chipping the boards, so I switched to a hand saw after a few cuts. Our awesome neighbor lent me his shop light after he saw that I was using the single bulb and the headlights on my wife's car to see what I was cutting in the garage.

Sunday's installation went a lot smoother, but since I had to work, I didn't quite finish. Three quarters of the room is done, with the most difficult part yet to be done. There's a corner cabinet that I'll have to cut around that I'm not looking forward to. Good thing I bought an extra box of flooring. Brandi took some pictures of the work in progress, which I don't have at the moment, but I'll get them up some time this week.

Home Improvement

No, this isn't going to be some kind of commentary on Tim Allen or that nauseatingly cheesy sitcom. As things start to warm up and we have some money to dedicate to home improvement we're getting into that mode.

We purchased Logan's big boy bed, and once we get a matress, I'll be putting that together and we'll be updating the decor of his room. This weekend I'll be painting the ceiling in the dining room (white) and then last night I picked up flooring at Menards to put in the dining room. This will cover up the ugly, ruined, ugly hard wood floors that we have in the dining room now. I'll be putting down a Pergo-like laminate flooring, and hopefully I won't botch it up too much. I'll get some before and after shots of the project.

Further on down the road there's landscaping we'd like to do, but more importantly, there are cracks in the foundation that need to be investigated and repaired. I'm sure my wife has a whole, groan-inducing list of stuff that she'd like to get done, but I don't know what alls on there at this point.

The Great Flood of '08

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware of the havok and destruction that Hurricane Ike caused not only in Texas and the Gulf Coast, but strangely in the Midwest as well. Then again, if you’ve been living under a rock in the Gulf Coast, Texas or the Midwest, after last weekend you’re probably no longer alive to give a rat’s ass about what happened.

In case you don’t know, we live in Des Plaines, flood capital of the Midwest. We got at least five inches of rain between last Friday night and Saturday morning and then it rained nearly all day Saturday and all day Sunday. We got water in the basement, which we knew was going to happen, so it wasn’t a big deal. I think that house gets at least a little water every year. During the Great Flood of ‘07 not only was there water in the basement, but a branch fell across the power, cable and phone lines, which are all conveniently located in the same area. We hadn’t moved in yet, but we did have some stuff there. A neighbor two houses down generously ran an extension cable to the house so my father-in-law could alternately run his sump pump and refrigerator.

Since our basement floor has it’s low spots, we had anywhere from two to four inches of rain water down there. The water is out now, but the clean up continues. I was at work all day Saturday, so I didn’t get to witness the awesome force of the storm outside our house, but Brandi did take some pictures.

Unfortunately, she didn’t get any pictures of the back yard that turned into a small lake. Now you can see the water’s peak back there because of the line of wood chips that was washed out of our gardens and into the yard. Our neighbor had it even worse, and on Sunday I could see a whole chain of lakes starting in his yard and going to consecutive yards behind his. I was over by his house last night, and while the back yard isn’t showing standing water any more, it’s still muddy and stinks.

The water level was building on the streets when I left for work at 8:30 and had gone back down by the time I got home at 6:00. There were several roads closed on the way home, so I had to find my way around all the flood water. Had I tried to go to work a couple hours later, there would have been no way I would have made it off of the driveway.

The skirt of our driveway where it goes to the street is under there somewhere. Also, I like the island look around the trees.

At some point our neighbor standing in what was left of his yard, yelling at passing cars to slow the fuck down because they were putting waves in his living room.

We’re about four blocks from the Des Plaines River, as the crow flies. The river came up quite a bit over the weekend, which was the cause of most of the road closures around us. On Sunday when we were getting ready to leave for Michigan, we stopped to get gas at a station that is about two and a half blocks from the river. The water level at that time was up to the intersection where the gas station was located, and according to my father-in-law, the river came up another 20 feet on Sunday. Wowsers.

The house that my parents live in and that I grew up in is almost at the top of a large hill, so we would get very minimal water in the basement, if any during such a storm. If they get any, it might be a large puddle near the sump pump. Needless, to say, I didn’t realize how much the water would come up.

This is from the Chicago Tribune “In Des Plaines, where nearly 2,500 homes and buildings were affected by the weekend’s torrential rain...”

And this is from the Des Plaines Times “The river was at 9.32 feet as of 5:45 p.m. Monday, according to the National Weather Service’s report. The waters had crested at 10.01 feet at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, and were expected to fall below flood stage by 6 a.m. Wednesday.”

I heard on some news program that this was the most rain the Midwest has had in 24 or 48 hours since they started recording rain howevermany years ago. Was this the worst flood that Des Plaines has ever had? No, at least not according to Brandi who remembers someone canoeing down our street during the Great Flood of ‘87 or ‘88.

One of the most surprising things that we saw from the news was at Indiana Beach (only an hour or so from us), where the floodwaters washed out the sand underneath the main parking lot, and the lot then collapsed into the 10-foot-deep sink hole that was left. I don’t remember how much sand was washed into Lake Michigan, but it was a lot.

Uh, honey, do you remember where we parked? This doesn't look like it at all.

This is from the Chesterton Tribune: “The main beach parking lot at Indiana Dunes State Park, what’s left of it, is swamped by rushing floodwaters on Sunday after collapsing into rubble when the sand beneath was washed out and washed away by the flooding of Dunes Creek.”

So there you have it. A fun little experience in the Flood Capital of the Midwest. Will it happen again? I’m sure it will. Will we be ready for it? As ready as we can be. Maybe before next summer I can put the house on stilts and we’ll be able to stand above it all and laugh.

My Fun Night

Last night we spent much time cleaning up after the Great Flood of '08. The water is all finally gone from the basement, which is to say, there aren't two inches plus of standing water any more. Some things are still wet, obviously. We got a good chunk done, but there's still plenty to go.

I started by bringing 98% of Logan's toys in the basement upstairs for cleaning. This was all done later, but Brandi wanted to get them up stairs, and I needed the room for other stuff. The toy gathering included filling a garbage bag with 100+ plastic balls from his ball pit for individual cleaning. Then there was the area rug that was still dripping with water that needed to go outside. Brandi's dad had already rolled it up, so I used one of the conveniently placed ground-level windows to shove the heavy, stinking, dripping roll of carpet out onto the driveway. I did get less water on me at this point than I would have thought. After that, Brandi's dad met me outside so that we could unroll the rug and put it over the porch railing. Mmmmmm, love that stagnant water on thick carpet pile smell.

Following that I took down the drapes that we had downstairs, which are pretty long and touch the ground, and threw that in the washer with the sheet that we had up to separate one side of the basement from the other.

After Logan went to bed we started the toy clean up. We watched Fringe and then a couple episodes of Dexter while Brandi wiped off the general toys and I dunked and then wiped off approximately 198 (I counted) plastic balls in a mixture of mostly water and a little bleach. It wasn't too bad of a task, although my knees don't like me after I sit cross-legged on the floor for so long. Now my hands smell like I've been swimming.

The next step will be to mop the linoleum and then roll it up to dry the concrete floor underneath.

All of this probably sounds worse than the damage really was. We knew the basement floods, so most things that could get damaged were up on top of plastic tubs and other things. Plus, this is giving us the excuse to go through boxes of crap and through out the stuff we don't need and organize better.

Brandi took some pretty cool pictures of the street and yard while I was at work on Saturday, which are on her computer, so I'll get those up later.

Also, had a good time in Michigan on Sunday/Monday, but I'll get to that later too.