500 square feet.

Ok, confession time…. Last week we had a chance to add a quick 3-day job to our schedule. One of those in and out, labor only, the homeowner is supplying all the material type jobs.

Since another job had been delayed, and the job we filled in.. for the delayed job was also delayed, I made some changes to our plans and said yes we could do it.

The biggest part of this job was to lay 500 sq feet of a laminate snap together floating floor….how hard could that be??

Well now we don’t do this that often, but I have done some in the past. After all, we are carpenters. The guys who have to know our jobs plus everyone elses. We are the cogs that  keep the machine chugging along and nothing stops us……….. until….

Yep, the Big Dog here just spent all afternoon laying and snapping together floor, laying and snapping, laying and snapping, with the help of Tyler. Yeah, I was showing him how it was done, feeling pretty good about myself, thinking we just might finish on schedule.

Then “He” showed up. He being Adam. “He” started looking at some of the floor, knelt down and felt some of the joints. “He” looked up and said…”why are some of these not snapped in, in fact a lot of them are not snapped in”. In my boss man sort of way, I said something like “get out of town”, thinking “He” may have been joking. “No I’m not joking…..these joints are not locked together.”

I stopped what I was doing, looked closer at what “He” was trying to show me, and my heart sank! I could see what he was talking about. I wanted to scream, in fact I think I told him to go away. Maybe if “He” was not there, the problem would go away. Not so.

As I sat on the steps looking at things, I was trying to reason in my mind as how it might be okay, it might not be that bad, afterall, it was me, the boss who had laid all that floor. It couldn’t be wrong. The Boss doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes.

Well this one did. No matter what angle I tried to justify it from, it kept coming back to the same, the only conclusion I could come to. The floor had to be pulled up and re-done.

What took about 4 hours to lay, came up in about 10 minutes.

Fortunately, once I had my ways of installing corrected, we were able to re-lay it in about 2 hours.

I really really wanted to have someone to blame. I couldn’t. There was no way around it, it was me. Bottom line was I just messed up.

Well some days the Big Dog is all barking, this day the Big Dog had his tail between his legs and was whimpering.

~ The Carpenter

See photos of this project at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.717647334989115.1073741912.342655239154995&type=3