Thursday, June 18, 2015

And A Final Day of Rush and Install ...

The carpeting looks MARVELOUS, and today the laminate gets installed. That should be the end of installations for a while (until a wall covering has been determined).


Our laminate is similar to this. I can't wait to see how it looks
in the kitchen. 


The guys finished the carpet install within four hours of arrival. They had complex areas - the two stair cases and a small landing - but did a wonderful job with all of the wrap-overs and the ornamental rod iron spiral handrail with its many, many screws that had to be removed and then reinstalled over the new carpet. We moved a lot of the furniture back into the living room last night and pulled the breakfast area table and chairs out of the kitchen in prep for today's segment.


Edge to edge stairs are relatively easy but stairs that need the carpet
wrapped around the edge, like the step at the top, is much more
complex. We had an entire staircase with wrap-around. It made
the guys really have to work, but Desmond is great at his job and has
years of experience installing. In fact, he installed my father-by-marriage's
carpeting more than ten years ago. 


The draperies arrived yesterday too, so my afternoon was spent dodging rain while picking the box of drapes up from the shop and installing them on my very old center-pull transom rod. Of course, the minute I tried to actually open them, the old cord in the transom snapped. It took two trips to my local fabric store for cording, several You-Tube videos (none of which had as old a system as we have in our house) to discover how to correctly thread the cord to allow proper pull and a frustrated sigh. Finally when searching under antique fixtures I found someone with a brilliant idea. "Find another fixture like the one you are restringing, pull it down and follow the thread path used in it for your replacement cord." Brilliant. I found a similar rod in my basement den, pulled it, and after another hour or so, I finally had the stringing correct. Of course, the span is much longer, and the drapes don't pull well. I'll look into possibly getting a new rod. JC Penney's has a heavy-duty one that will take my 154" width for $54 which isn't bad.

The drapes look quite different than the sample swatch of fabric. Instead of a brown/grey, they are a distinct blue/grey and in low light, they have a black and white look. They're stunning, but I'll need to shift my color palette for the wallpaper to pull the two aspects of carpet and drapes into a cohesive whole. The last two were DH's decisions. Now I'll give him input, but the final decision will be mine.

But one step at a time. Laminate first. I'll try and get some before/after pics up for all of you either Friday or Monday. At least I can get to the gym today - I missed my swimming yesterday. *sigh* Happy Thursday, everyone!


1 comment:

Pam said...

Wow!! What a difference on those stairs! No more thread-bare treads!
And, your kitchen flooring is gonna be dy-no-mite!! Thinking of something similar for my bathroom floors (whenever I get the chance to do them....) Huggles, Poo