Mais Oui - Ennui

      To the tune of Frere Jacques

I am bored, I am bored,

I am bored, I am bored,

I am bored, I am bored,

I am bored, I am board.

Thank You  Mr Vivian Stanshall

God, I hate laying flooring. I'm bored with boards. My ankles hurt. My knees hurt. My back hurts. If I ever see another board, it'll be too soon. How can anything be so mind-numbingly boring? How can anything be so frustratingly fiddly? I'd rather watch Celebrity Let's Go Strictly Come Dancing For Sport Relief On Ice Live Starring Ant and Dec for twelve hours a day for a month than lay flooring. 

I tried putting it off. I took stuff downstairs and put it in my shed. I brought my wheelie bin back in. I had a brew and a fag. I tidied up.

This, for me, is tidy.

Tidy, tidy, tidy.

I knocked the shelf out of the fireplace. 

 

But eventually I had to make a start.

Firstly, I took up the old carpet. Here's a tip - cut the old carpet into small pieces and put them into a bin bag as you go along. It's easier to move a couple of bags than to move a whole, dirty, dusty carpet. Just slice it into bits with a Stanley knife (...other craft knives are available), bag it up, and save yourself a job later.

I started the boring boards at the doorway. Any carpet layer, decorator, builder or carpenter will tell you that, regardless of how long they've been doing their job, they have yet to find a 'true' square wall. If you start flooring in a corner of a room, and expect the final result to be all square at the end, then I have some magic beans I would like to sell you.

I put some newspaper under the laminate - for extra insulation, padding and underlay. Don't bother with underlay if you are on a budget. Use newspapers instead. Remember to 'step' your boards - you are going to have to cut your boards to length. Use a new board to cut out the length you need for the end of each spread, and then use the remainder of that board for the first piece of your next spread. And remember you can start from either end - Don't have short cut lengths at only one end of the room. If you need to, simply cut a new board in half to give you a 'step'. This means you cut down on waste sections - don't be tempted to cut filler pieces from both ends of the same board, as you will be left with a bit from the middle that you won't be able to use somewhere else.

Well, that's enough for one day - I'm halfway done, so I'll finish it tomorrow.

On a side note - look who I saw today...

... the first ladybird of the year. On February 15th. Now that's early.