How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time, one bite at a time. How do you move an upright grand piano? One key at a time, my friends, one key at a time. How did R, L and I move a piano? Not one key at a time, that's for sure. My neck is letting me know that our method of moving was not the right method. The piano was in the kitchen - although the acoustics were so much better in the kitchen, it did make it a little difficult to get to the table for dinner. Actually, it made it impossible to reach the table. Now that the flooring is down... Yes! The flooring is down! What a weekend that was. RL and the kids rented a nail gun or whatever they call the nail thingie you need to put down wood floors. Saturday morning the drill sargeant got us out of bed - he is too cheery in the morning - and we started trying to figure it all out (not the cheeriness, the flooring. We will never figure out the cheeriness!) By 11:00 p.m. the nail gun had given out along with our knees, butts, and any other flesh covered muscle body part. RL decided to call it a night and we would start as soon as the rental place opened and he could replace the nail gun. Off he went bright and early the next morning. He brought one back and we slipped into the little routine we had established on Saturday. Except this nail gun decided not to work from the get-go. Off RL headed to the rental place - again. The third time was a charm and we got going. Did we buy enough wood? Well, since L and I were in charge of placing the wood while R and RL were hammering the crap out of the nails, we kept looking at each other, shaking our heads, saying we were cutting it close. We did cut it close. So close that we have to go back and buy one more pack of wood. Thirty freakin' square feet of wood because we are three pieces short. Oh well. If it could happen, it would and it did. So, soon we will be off to the wood place to buy the flooring and wait for it to acclimate for a week or two. In the meantime, we received the replacement loveseat - yippee! We bought bookshelves for the gazillion books that we own and put them together. Now we are slowing gathering the books and placing them on the shelves. We've moved as much as the furniture to its new location as we could and now we wait for the flooring to be officially finished. Oh, we are also on the hunt for a new computer table. I have a five foot area and want something a little sturdier than the one we have right now. The desk we have is fine, but you never know when the little roll out shelf that holds the keyboard is going to come crashing down...which normally happens when you are quietly surfing the net while everybody is in bed and you are thoroughly enjoying a few minutes of quiet time.

Here's a picture of the floors that R took while she was sprawled out on the floor. I thought she was trying to 'capture the true essence of the flooring', but now I think she was just exhausted and trying to convince us that she was being creative. Yes, that is one of our piles of knitting books in the corner. They are never too far from reach.

This is part of the process. Tar paper goes down on the subflooring - and for those of you who don't know - tar paper smells like really, really dirty feet. Those legs belong to L and me while we were figuring out the best way to lay those boards down so the seams were spaced properly and trying not to waste boards. I tell you, L had it down to an art. It was almost scary! He could place those boards so they didn't have to be trimmed! Freaky!

Last but certainly not least - Ginger decided to leave her mark on the tar paper. She would venture down from time to time and then get scared to death by the newness of it all and run back upstairs. This is the only proof we have that the entire family was involved!

Meanwhile, knitting has been found among the chaos - it actually still had all its needles in it! - and hopefully the sock will be finished and the second started. R is still plugging along on fair projects. Homeschool planning is still going on. And, as always, the projects on the house will continue.