Myself and my good friend Pascal, who’s agreed to do our new flooring with me, spent a good 6 or so hours yesterday working on the project.

We had a long and very useful discussion with “Jim”, one of the folks at RONA, (and in truth the best RONA employee I’ve ever talked to… frequently their help is none too helpful, but this gentleman was just extraordinary, a veritable font of knowledge and good humour. The end result was us deciding that it was going to be a lot more cost effective (not to mention easy to install) to do Laminate, even though Aimée and I had picked out a Bamboo hardwood that we loved. After confirming this change of plans with Aimée, we grabbed 20 of the 48 boxes of laminate that we had as a backup plan (we have to pick up the remaining 28 boxes from a different RONA today. the alternative was a wait of 2 weeks for it to be shipped in), plenty of underlay, and a few tools we needed.

The most handy of the tools we picked up was a good floor scraper with a long handle. The amount of time that has saved us is amazing. It took a long time to get the parquet up, as it had been thoroughly glued to the underlying vinyl. Thankfully, the vinyl peeled well, and the top half came away with the parquet, so we were able to develop a good system of peeling it back in large chunks and ripping them away. We’ve still got a little destruction to do, but by Tuesday evening, we should be starting in on the construction.

Yesterday’s experience was a great reaffirmation of the community spirit at WindSong: we had half a dozen or more people stop by to chat, to offer their advice, and to say hello. One of the 12 year olds came in and helped for a good bit of time.

It was also a reaffirmation of something Pascal and I have discussed in the past: how close our group of friends is, and essentially like family. It’s amazing to have folks who you can rely on when you need to get stuff done, or when the chips are down, and who are there to celebrate the victories. Pascal is definitely one of those folks. Thanks bro!