AS I WAS SAYING
Floored
by Alan Williamson
“I can’t stand this carpet anymore, it’s disgusting,” my wife said one day out of the blue. Not quite hearing her right, I thought she said “I can’t stand this country anymore, it’s disgusting” and wholeheartedly agreed that we should take the initiative and do something about it.
“I don’t like what I’m seeing either, haven’t for quite a while,” I confided. “I’m glad we’re on the same page with this. Let’s put our heads together, commit some real time and energy, and do something meaningful, something transformational.”
“Great,” Sherry said. “I was thinking of putting a wood floor in the dining room and berber or frieze carpeting through the rest of the house.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Suddenly, that “same page” I thought we were on was a page in a whole different book written in another language.
“I know, I know, I’ve never been a wood person, but I was thinking it would really set the dining room off from the rest of the house,” Sherry clarified.
“You want to change the flooring throughout the whole house?”
“Well, not the kitchen and family room, but everything else. Did you have something different in mind?
“Well, since you asked, I was thinking of influencing social and economic change through a personal investment in political activism,” I cheerfully professed.
“Excuse me?” The testiness of those two words didn’t bode well for Sherry’s openness to go in a different direction.
“Or wood in the dining room, carpet in the rest of the house – what you said,” I countered, slickly correcting course.
“Good I’ll make some calls.”
So began our home reflooring project, or to put it more accurately, our “Move Everything We Own From 90 percent of the House and Put it in 10 Percent of the House While We Camp Out in a Tiny Corner of the Kitchen Project.”
When you’ve lived in the same house for a long time, things have a way of accumulating. In our home, the contents can be divided into three distinct categories: furniture and accessories, home electronics, and the staggering flea market-size collection of things my wife has crammed into every inch of closet space. In the small guest bedroom closet alone we have four boxes of gift wrapping materials, an assortment of hats (some of them straw), extra blankets and pillows, an oscillating ceramic heater, a battery-powered black and white TV, a hurricane kit, a first-aid kit, a sewing kit, board games, two pair of binoculars, a tripod, fake leaves made of silk, “silk” shirts made of polyester, duffle bags, tote bags, store bags, luggage, tax records, old record albums and six large plastic storage boxes of photos – three of them quite possibly not of people we know.
The upheaval of transporting all that stuff from the closets to the dumping ground formerly known as our family room was unsettling, but not nearly as unnerving as the installation of the carpet and wood. I’m not a flooring expert, but I sensed we were in trouble when the “wood guy” kept reading the box the planks came in and making puzzled grunting sounds. After a couple of hours of grunting, he snapped several lines of red chalk on the floor. I presumed this was to mark his territory, which seem plausible when, in a move reminiscent of tribal rituals I’ve seen on National Geographic specials, he danced in ever widening circles through the chalk before tracking its indelible stain to far off corners of the house.
Meanwhile, the carpet guys, inspired by the wood guy’s mystical approach to project planning, set about carrying out their own ingenious strategy of installing carpet in the living room first and then relentlessly trashing it on their 115 trips back and forth to do the bedrooms.
After installing approximately 12 planks during a six-hour shift, the wood guy decided to quit while he was ahead, and rode off on his bicycle (yes, his bicycle). The carpet guys, who had arrived three hours late, asked if we minded if they worked late into the evening. After eight hours of carpet-laying chaos, we minded.
Things didn’t go any better the next day when the crucial merging of the wood floor and the carpet was to be executed. According to Sherry’s vision, there would be a gently sweeping curve that would define the transition from the dining room wood to the living room carpet. When the moment of creative conception came, we were, to put it succinctly, “floored.” Instead of a soft, graceful curve, the meeting of the carpet and wood resembled the jagged outline of an eroded beach during low tide.
“I can’t stand this flooring, it’s disgusting,” Sherry said, surveying the carnage.
“Isn’t that what you said before we started this project?” I asked, trying to sort out the forensics of our misadventure.
“Yes, but that’s before we spent money trying to improve it, so now I’m even more disgusted.”
“Let’s never do this again,” I proposed, running my toes along the eroded coastline that was supposed to be the border of our new carpet and wood floors.
“Never do what again? Make a home improvement?”
“No, never use a company again that charges half the price of their competitors and sends guys as inept as me to do the work.”
“I think that’s a change in policy worth making,” Sherry acknowledged. “Now what do you want to do about this eroded beach of a floor border?”
“Well, since you asked, I was thinking we could buy some rubber sand crabs and jellyfish from one of those tourist shops out by the pier and make it into a whole ‘bad day at the beach’ theme.”
“Maybe add some beer bottles, cigarette butts, food wrappers,” Sherry brainstormed.
“Yes, excellent! Maybe some medical waste, too. And odd items of clothing – a glove, a girdle, a straw hat, one shoe.”
“Wait here,” Sherry nodded. “I’ve got some stuff I was going to cram back in the closet”
“Bring out those boxes of old photos,” I yelled. “Especially the ones of people we don’t know!”
Alan Williamson is an award-winning writer with 27 years in the field of true fiction (advertising). A practical man who knows that writing for a living is risky going, he has taken steps to pursue a second, more stable career as a leggy super model. Alan can be reached at alwilly@bellsouth.net.