Ch,ch,ch,ch,changes

I know I've been lax at keeping this blog going but no one ever told me just how stressful a situation like ours could be. We hired a flooring contractor who turned out to be somewhat uh, out of touch with reality? He couldn't seem to tell the difference between what really happened and what was just happening in his head. It became maddening and frustrating so I fired him to save us all the possible bad outcomes. If I had it to do over, I would still have fired him but it's turned out to be an overwhelming amount of work. Since it was late in the game, there was no way to get a good contractor to do the job on our tight timeline and I didn't want to add another stress element. I ended up accepting that I would be doing all the flooring as a one woman team.
I've done many DIY projects over the years and know that nothing ever goes as planned and it's never done when you plan for it to be. Thus the reason I set a generous time frame for both the kitchen tile and the laminate in the rest of the house. I truly thought I would have finished well ahead of schedule but I didn't count on the North Las Vegas Utilities office throwing a monkey wrench into it all. They seem hell bent on giving people bogus information and pretending it didn't happen. To make a long story short, I ended up with no water for three days. No water means no grouting. I had no laminate so I couldn't get started on that while I worked out the water issue. All I could do is get the prep work done for the laminate. I pulled all the carpet and padding, yanked up the tack strips and scraped the glued mess off the cement floor. Finally, yesterday, after 5 hours waiting for them to figure out why I still had no water, I was able to start grouting. Our appliances are due to be delivered on Saturday so there was no more time for messing around. I got about a third of the kitchen grouted and gave in to exhaustion. Today is Friday. I am supposed to be on my second day of laminate but I haven't even really started my first day. We are moving in on Monday.
There are all kinds of frustrations associated with these projects and everything changes constantly. The one thing I need to change can't be changed and that's the move in date. We are seven days from the end of our lease and I will need time to get back to the rental to do the carpets and clean the house. It may be a week or so before I'm able to do another blog but I wanted to express the reality of what's going on during this whole fiasco.
I must tell you that the kitchen tile job is gorgeous. I had envisioned a decent outcome but didn't expect to be so impressed with the incredibly unique look and feel of the finished pattern. So far, the grout color only serves to enhance the beauty of it. I will be able to post the before and after photos in my next blog and I'm so excited to share it with everyone.
Until next time...