Catching up with the Lalemans

It's amazing how quickly time flies by when you don't have much of it to spare.

It doesn't seem like it's been a week and a half since I last updated the old Laleblog. I can also see that I need to update the banner, because it's December and, well, it's not November anymore. And that's November's banner up there.

So what have we been up to since our warm and sunny Turkey Day?

Freezing our butts off.

It got incredibly cold (for San Antonio) last week, and so we've been conserving energy and staying warm. And shopping. Without much success, at least on my part.

Actually, we have been pretty busy. The day before Thanksgiving, we decided to take the plunge and buy laminate floors for our living room and (we thought) dining room. The day after Thanksgiving, we rested, then Saturday, I started taking our the existing flooring.







Those first two pictures are from the realtor posting, so that's not our furniture, but all of the tile in those pictures was scheduled to come out. The third picture, you can see how ugly the carpet was.

So anyway, Saturday morning, bright and early, I pulled out the carpet in the living room and hallway. It took all of 20 minutes. After Monica got up and left with Rachel, I started taking out the tile.

It took me the rest of the day.

To do a little patch by our back door, maybe 15 square feet total, took me almost 3 hours. That's when I decided a bigger slegehammer might be helpful. The part by the fireplace took about the same amount of time despite being a much bigger area. The 10 pound slegehammer took care of most of the work, until it broke.

That's right, I broke a slegehammer taking out tile.

Of course that made the decision not to take the tile out of the dining room that much easier to make.

On Sunday, I started laying out the moisture barrier, which took most of the morning.





Because of the 45 degree angled walls in our living room (our house has all kinds of strange angles), the first part of the laminate required lots of cutting. By Sunday evening, I had about 1/4 of the floor done.



It took me until Wednesday before I finished, and I had to take 1/2 day off work to get it done. We still have transition pieces and baseboards to put in, but the floor is done. I don't have a good picture of it yet becase we moved the furniture back in the room and it's still a bit of a mess.

It looks nice though, so chalk up another home improvement project as a success. There's plenty to do in this house, and I'm looking forward to working on it and making it our own.

I took this weekend off to just spend time with the family and attempt to shop for Christmas presents. Next weekend I'm going to tackle the Christmas decorations.