After a very long week, the main floor of our house now has very nice 4 inch solid oak flooring.  The only areas that do not have hardwood floors now are the two bathrooms.  It was a very long week last week.  My boss was nice enough to let me work from home while the floors were being installed.  Jen and Emma went to Jen’s parents for the week.  I was busy in the evenings, moving things around to getting some of the todo list taken care of.  It was a very productive and tiring week (for both Jen and I 🙂 ).  The deck is partially stained.  Still have to do the railings, but the flooring is all set.  I had a little run in with the power washer two weeks ago.  My wrist is healing nicely now.  I found out our power washer can take skin right off of a human body if you get it to close.

We still have a few things to move back upstairs and a few pictures to hang.  We also want to put a little padding or something under our new area rug in the living room.  Still a little bit hard for Emma to play on, or shall we say bounce around on.  The floor turned out better than we expected.  Taylor did not like it at first but is fine now.  We just have to cut her nails and I mean cut her nails.  She has already left a few marks from getting startled, but I hope to have her nails short enough that she will not be marking the floors anymore.

Over the weekend Jen and Emma went down to see Grandma and Papa in Stevensville. While they were gone for the day we had scheduled to have a Handy man come out and install a new Pella sliding glass door. In the middle of waiting for the door to arrive all of the systems that are hosted in MD for the company I work for went down due to a Oracle db cluster having issues over night. We finally decided to start a full server by server reboot to remedy the problem. By the time this process started the Handy Man had shown up. Luckily the reboot process did not require my interaction so I was able to get the Handy Man all he needed so he could get started. At that point the db cluster just came up and app servers were getting restarted. I cycled a few services on another server and the Point of Sales system and inventory control system were back up. The handy man took a little longer than I expected (also a bit longer than he estimated, but got it for the same prices none the less). I was trimming the carpet by the door and hanging the drapes around 4pm. After a little clean up, the new door is better than we had hoped. Now to see how it handles the winter. Our old door was starting to get very difficult to open an close but in the winter it would ice up so it was almost impossible to open an close. This new door you can open and close with your pinky finger. Hopefully Emma does not want to play with it to much. The nice thing is, is the door is on the outside so she can’t get to it when it is open and the lock is to high for her to reach now. The other door she was just talk enough to lock and unlock, only locked me out once and she unlocked is very quickly after she locked it.

Last week I ordered a new patio door. Looks like that will be in sometime around 6/16/09. Just have to schedule the installer to come out and replace the existing door after it comes in.

We went ahead and booked the flooring installer for the week of July 6th. He will drop off the trim work the week before so I can get a coat of paint on the quarter round and stain the shoe molding for the kitchen.

Saturday I ordered all of the flooring and drop in flush mount registers and trim for the top of the stairs. Now we play the waiting game. Hopefully everything falls into place.

I want to have the door in before the floors. The flooring was a very good price due to over stock. We got very lucky. We wanted either 4 or 5 inch natural red oak. They had 4 inch red oak from a place in Michigan that we really liked. Now to see what it looks like once it comes in and gets installed. I think we are going to be very happy.

Just picked up some Bona floor cleaner in preparation of the new floors. Got a few packs of felt pads so we are ready to put all of the furniture back on the floors after it is installed. Don’t want to mark up any of the floors with furniture.

We have decided to stay in our current home. We had been toying with looking for a larger home. With the market the way it is, we really don’t want to take a loss on our house so we are just going to make some changes that we have always wanted. The windows and sliding glass door in our house are horrible. We have decided to just replace the slider right now. We are going with a Pella pro 450. Just ordered it yesterday from Menards. Went with a wood door and a white inside and outside finish. We hope it will be in later this month. We are almost ready to schedule the installation of hardwood floors for all of the rooms on the main floor of our house. We are in the final stages of negations with two different quotes. Amazing what you can negation in a bad economy. Depending on the quotes we go with. We may have talked one local store down just over 4 grand in their bid. Just waiting on the last bid from a local installer. We are hoping to schedule the installation to happen the week after the 4th of July weekend. I hope everything goes smooth as far as the schedule we want for the door and floor installation.