We have flooring. Yes, flooring.

Oh, you know the end is officially in sight when you can stand up (almost straight) and say (with a grimace), "Wow. That looks like a real floor."

And then go take a fistful of ibuprofen and lie down for a while.

Yes, we have a bathroom floor. Much like the floor in the upstairs bathroom, I can take full credit for this one as I did pretty much the whole thing myself. The War Department had a few too many beers on Friday night, if you must know, and wasn't up to helping much. Well, to be honest, that's only a half-truth; yes, she had too many beers on Friday night, but we had already decided that this particular job was probably best left to a me, given that only one person would be able to work in the bathroom at a time, and I was reasonably confident in my ability to do the floor myself.

The first part of the task on Saturday morning was to set up a little workstation for myself in the office so I wouldn't have to keep trudging back into the workshop every time I needed to trim down one of the planks:



Of course, the planks were far too wide to be cut on the chop saw (I used it exactly twice), so I wound up using the table saw almost exclusively -- except for those times I had to go trudging back to the workshop so I could clamp a piece down to the workbench and have a go at it with the jigsaw.

Then, as per the instructions, I opened all of the bundles of flooring so I could pick and choose pieces at random and not wind up with a weird pattern in the floor:



Which... I kinda did anyway, so ... well, whatever...

Anyway, the next step was a false start. See, the instructions (yes, I read them and no, they weren't singularly uninformative. I found them to be of tremendous use. Mostly to cushion the bottom of the floor tool so I wouldn't mark the cork when I was hammering away on it trying to get the boards to close up that last 32nd of an inch, but I digress) say to make sure that none of the pieces of flooring are cut to less than 4 inches wide. Given the weird shape of the bathroom, this was actually much more frustrating to work out than you'd think. Remember that I'm not very good at math, and then take a peek at the worksheet I used to figure out how wide the first strip of flooring needed to be:



(The reason there are two worksheets is because I worked out all of my calculations on the first worksheet (the one on the left) based on the floor planks being 7 and three-eighths of an inch wide. The right-hand worksheet is the one I made up after I remembered that the planks are actually 7 and FIVE-eighths of an inch wide. Measure twice, cut once, grasshopper -- but it's probably okay if you spend twenty minutes working up a plan based on the faulty first measurement. Sure. No one's in a hurry here or anything.)

Working from the correct calculations, I cut the first piece of floor to exactly four inches, got the first row hammered together somehow, and then started work on the second:



AND... that's about where I stopped for a break because I realized that I really should have borrowed Clamb's floor tool because I had to go off to the damn store and buy one.

But with the new tool proving to be something of a valuable asset, I managed to get into the groove a little bit and was pleased when my measuring turned out to be pretty dead on, at least at the first odd corner:



Then the second corner went in all right, even though it had a tricky angle on it, and I realized I hadn't even sworn at anything since I put in the third row or so. Woot! Now I was cooking with gas!



(And where, you may ask, was Amy during all this work on the floor? Well, she did come to the store with me to pick up the little flooring tool on Saturday, but then she went right back to what she was doing before we went out:



Ah, must be rough, eh?)

Anyway, it took me pretty much the whole day, but I got it done. Here's a shot of where I called it a day:



Yeah, that last piece wasn't actually hammered home yet, but it was proving rather finicky, I was starving, my back hurt, I had to clean up and make dinner, and I just couldn't deal with the nasty little bugger. As it turned out, I pulled up three rows this morning anyway so I could fix the second of the two corners at the shower because I'd munged up the cork pretty badly trying to get the pieces to lock together, but it all went back in with no problems, and it's officially finished.

(Oh, and my measuring job with the worksheets and whatnot? I was off by less than a quarter-inch. Not too shabby, especially for me!)

If you're wondering where the hole for the toilet went, I used the router to cut it out this afternoon. Which, of course, required another trip to Canadian Tire because, for some reason, among ALL the bits Amy had for her router, she didn't have a flush-trimming bit. Go figure.

Of course, you can't see the end result because we had to cover it up with cardboard in preparation for the return of the electricians, who are coming in tomorrow to finish wiring the outlets and putting in these babies:



Yes, they install cardboard boxes. Why not?