Between Houses

My husband, Crew, made a few trips to the country house by himself.  He would take loads of boxes or lawn items or whatever we could pack into the Tuff Shed while I stayed and packed boxes at the Dallas house.  He also ripped out all of the old flooring at the country house, and patched the concrete...and took off the baseboards.  We decided to get laminate flooring, Pergo actually...Home Depot was running a special with $99 installation, and free installation on carpet...so, we went for it, there was a Home Depot 34 miles from the house.  It was suppose to be a quick installation but the house had to be measured professionally.  You get a 10% discount at Home Depot if you show your military ID...saving money is good.  

We thought the floor was ready, we were wrong...even though the floor previously had laminate, they had not leveled the floor...and it was bad.  We thought the noise the floor made was from the cheap laminate and poor quality underlayment.  Nope, and leveling the floor was extra.  But...the flooring we picked out was on back order too, something they neglected to tell me.  They kept telling me when I called Home Depot a different date...they don't install flooring until they get everything.  The carpet was at the installers, part of the laminate was there too.  But not the floor my husband wanted for the office.  I pleaded with them...told them that the carpet was for bedrooms, the majority of the floor was there...it was one room we were waiting on.  I started calling after a week of waiting on an installation date, two weeks passed, I called and they could not give me a date, the installers would not schedule anything until they had all the materials.  I called, and called, and called...they finally agreed to install the carpet after a month you know where the installers came from?  Dallas!  No wonder they wanted to do it all at once!  It is 165 mile drive.

I think it took two and a half months from the time we ordered the flooring until they set the installation date.  The flooring had to sit for a few days before installation too.  More waiting, because not all the flooring came in, they scheduled other jobs.  Major frustration for us, all of this was costing us money...two sets of utilities and two house payments!  The Dallas house was still not on the market, we had boxes stacked everywhere.  We went back and forth so many times between the two houses we lost count.  We didn't want to move furniture twice, we had bids for a moving company to move packed boxes and furniture for us...and kept having to change the date because the flooring was not installed yet.

In the mean time, we painted and painted, and cleaned and patched...between the houses.  We would box up more things at the Dallas house and brought them to the country house.  In the Piney Woods of Texas, it was the rainy season and winter...it was cold and wet. The floors were all bare concrete now, the baseboards removed, we were tired and still sleeping on an air mattress.  Our bodies ached, our feet hurt, we were cooking on a camp stove still at the country house.  The kitchen sink was still leaking, we were waiting on countertops.  At this point my surrogate son, Mark had not done all the plumbing work yet.  We were still taking quick showers.  I called Home Depot again and told them we were making two house payments, that we were driving back and forth sleeping on an air mattress waiting on flooring, could they please install what the carpet so we could have at least two rooms that we could move things into?