I've delayed posting about this little project for far too long! I remodeled my living room starting back in October sometime. It's been an ongoing process, but I'm basically done at this point.

Old Living Room:

Old Living Room

I don't have a very good picture of the old living room... but you get the idea, right? Lame and crappy brown carpet and a bunch of old-assed wooden trim around the floor and windows. Bleh.

The Solution:

Phase 1: Tear things apart!

     
I think the subflooring was prettier than the carpet

 

Phase 2: Put in new Laminate Floor and Woodwork!

This worked out very well as it was a continuation of my kitchen flooring project from a while ago. Since the laminate flooring "clicks" together, it was simple to continue the same flooring type into my living room.

 
Continuing on from the Kitchen Floor (seen on the far left)

Hallway extending to Bedrooms (note crappy woodwork on staircase)

It took some definite elbow grease to get done, but, in the end, it turned out pretty sweet. Probably the most time consuming part of the process was cutting the laminate flooring to fit around the 3 doorways in the hallway.

Rather than replace the old staircase railings, I chose to paint them white. If more fundage becomes available in the future, maybe I'll get something better. The white doesn't look too bad, though.

Phase 3: Profit!

Some finishing pictures! (FYI, the Lower Left picture is a doorway) 

All in all, I spent probably a good $1100-1200 dollars on the new flooring, woodwork, and paint. Not too bad. Hopefully, if I sell this house someday, it will yield a high return on my investment!

If not, I'll have to go into the underpant stealing business....

Underpants Gnomes!

Today, I went to the Menards most local to me to return a heavy-ass mahogany door and a piece of weather stripping that I didn't need. I get up to the return desk and this old grandma scans in the door and checks the recipe - No problem.

Then the trouble starts...

She looks at this piece of weather stripping, sees that it has drill holes in it, and she's all, "we can't accept this because it has drill holes." Then, I'm like, "it comes with holes pre-drilled into it." She turns around and starts muttering to this fatbodied cashier. Then she proceeds to get on her headset and ask someone (assuming some random stockboy) if it this item comes pre-drilled.

I'm getting irritated...

A few more hushed words with the fatbodied clerk and she turns back to me, "sorry we can't accept this - it has drill holes in it and it doesn't have a UPC label." She was right about the label: when I purchased the weather stripping, one of the other pieces had a UPC label so they had just use that to ring up the price. Well, it just so happens this piece didn't have a UPC (way to go incompetent Menards stock boys).

Then She Really Pissed Me Off...

"Did you buy this from another store?" the geriatric asks. She had the audacity to accuse me of bringing this in from another store and attempting to return it. Yes, you stupid old hag, I legitimately returned this huge fucking, expensive mahogany door, but I devilishly wanted to slight you on a piece of weather stripping. I got really angry really fast. I'm like, "you guys have these in the back of the store, AND they come pre-drilled." Then her quivering-chin coworker chimes in and repeats word-for-word what the geriatric said.

Then I punched them both in the face!

Alright, not really, but that would have been so fulfilling! Instead, I gave them a mean-assed look, picked up my pre-drilled, illegitimate piece of weather stripping, and walked away without saying any words. I could have been a huge ass and continued to pursue this, but it wasn't worth going to jail over.

The Real Kicker about this Ordeal:

The piece of weather stripping cost exactly six god-damn dollars. They were willing to haggle me over the return of an item... that cost... $6.

WTF people - seriously.

 I decided to deck the Bachelor Pad out with some Yuletide Cheer.

Moderate Yule-itude

A couple of problems for this years lights display:

• I realized, after buying the lights, that my selection ended up being red, white, and blue. Not that there is anything wrong with those colors, but my neighbors will think I'm some sort of Gung-ho Patriot.
• The left side definitely needs lights up high (I don't have a big enough ladder to put them up).
• It kind of looks like a Casino boat - maybe it needs more colors?

Ah well, lesson learned. Next year I will make another attempt at it.

Today I went out to find the opossum hiding out in my garage. I looked around under all the crap I have against the walls and stuff - no dice. So, I popped the hood of my car. Sure enough, there he was just hangin out next to the engine block. It was probably nice and warm there. Check out the vid:

Oops!

After I dropped him, he skampered off into a corner under some cardboard.

Eventually, I caught him again and managed to snap off this photo. What's really funny about opossums is when you just hang them by their tail, they don't act very frightened, but if you corner them, they get really pissy.

 

The little guy grabbed onto this pole in the middle of the garage as I went by it. He didn't want to leave!



I let him go in a nearby park. He skampered off into some trees. Hopefully, he doesn't show up in garage again.

So, earlier today, I open up the door to my garage, flip the light on, and sitting in front of me is this gigantic rat-like thing. We both freeze and just stare at each other for like 5 seconds. I didn't know what the hell to do, so I shut the light off and closed the door, as if I didn't see anything at all.

So, I sit down on the computer and search around to identify the rat-like thing's species. I found out that it's a brazilian opossum. I guess these critters get into house and stuff when it's cold outside. I think he either got in the other day when I left my garage door open for like half the day or he could have gotten in through the ventilation system attached to my bitchin' solar panels.

At any rate, I want to catch him and get a picture of myself doing this.  So, I put on some gloves and went searching for him, but I couldn't find him. He's probably up in one of the car engines - that could be friggin' messy. I know he's still out there; I keep hearing bangs and shit getting knocked over. I guess opossums can be pretty vicious little bastards, so I might end up just shoeing him out with a broom.

He needs to go, though, the little bastard somehow pushed my MP3 player off of a table top, dropping it onto the concrete floor (it still works, thankfully) and, even worse, he left a nasty Opossum Dookie under my exercise bike. Gross, little dude, that's just gross.

My roommate, Tdogg, decided to make my sister and myself a delicious taco dinner, tonight. He's a pretty standup guy. He even went and bought the supplies to make everything. The evening was shaping up to be quite the gala event.

Unfortunately...

Our ceremony of taco-eating merriment turned sour when we discovered that Tdogg had bought a head of fucking cabbage instead of lettuce. He was like, "yea you can probably use that instead of lettuce." No way - no god damn way - you cannot use cabbage in lettuce's stead. To do so would practically be a crime against humanity... and all other things sacred.

Not a substitute for lettuce.

Anyway, needless to say, things were looking grim for taco dinner night. So, my brave sister set out for the Hyvee most local to us to retrieve a head of lettuce. Upon arrival, she was forced to battle an onslaught of incompetent Hyvee staff members. Travis and I waited... 5 minutes go by... 7 minutes... at 10 minutes, I gave up hope and went to play Guitar Hero; as far as I was concerned, darkness had encompassed taco dinner night. Then, suddenly, my sister returned. She was physically battered and mentally strained, but she had in tow a beautiful, glimmering head of lettuce. Her courageous act averted the great taco crises that evening!

We went on to have one of the best taco dinners... of all time.

The End

What happened?

I had just purchased my house and I was exploring the attic space^[1]. I wasn't even doing anything important. I was just digging around in the insulation, doing some initial planning for some projects. Then, suddenly, after a cracking noise and some frantic movement, I'm hanging by a crossbeam from my living room ceiling.

The box cover from the movie Cliffhanger depicts the scene almost perfectly.

So, there I was... just dangling there with only my bulbous muscles preventing me from falling to certain death. This image isn't entirely accurate: there wasn't a helicopter flying around behind me, but it was "an avalanche of thrills," as indicated by Jami Bernard from the New York Post.

Why, Kevin, why did you fall through?

Here's a question that gripped and shook the Nation for days afterward. A couple of theories were conjured:

• I lost my balance.
• I made the hole purposely in order to install a fire pole (how awesome would that be, for real).
• I enjoy laughing in the face of danger.

While there's some validity in all of these theories, the real reason is that I thought the ceiling drywall could support my weight. My assumption was, what experts would later call, a poor, stupid, but funny in a no-one-got-hurt sort of way assumption.

The Aftermath:

Initially, I was a little shocked, I think. There was insulation all friggin' over my living room. So, I started vacuuming it up as quickly as I could. During this time, my roommate Travis (otherwise known as Tdogg) wanders out of his room. After bearing witness to the scene, he nearly falls over from laughing so hard. You son of a bitch, Travis. 

Later, I called up my parents and rattled off the embarrassing details of what had transpired... in a completely downtrodden tonality. (You would be downtrodden, too!) Perhaps the worst part is that my parents actually laughed at me, but at least they agreed to help me fix the gigantic, gaping hole in my ceiling.

A few days later, the parents showed up to help fix my booboo. The quality of these images isn't so great - so sorry. Actually, they kind of look deshaveled like amatuer natural disaster photos or something, which is pretty damn fitting.

[1]This occurred a while ago - Circa January, 2006; long before I had this blog. But, it's been such a pivotal point in my life that I had to make a post about it so you can understand why I am the way I am!

I recently installed a new ceiling fan in my kitchen after impulse-buying it from Lowes. Ceiling fan installation is pretty much a huge pain in the ass: you have to cut a whole in the ceiling and dig around in insulation to mount and wire the thing up. But, hey, at least I didn't fall through my ceiling... again!

I had a realization. When the fan speed is on the lowest setting - slow enough that you can see the blades turning without blurring, it gives the room a totally laidback, pimp-like aura.

On the other hand, if you jack the fan all the way up to its highest setting, the room's atmosphere becomes chaotic, stressful, and frantic. People will, no doubt, be affected by the fan running on freak-speed. I predict they'd start fighting, breaking windows, and vandalizing and/or stealing my stuff. None of which are ideal scenarios, so I'm going to have to be careful.

One thing is for certain: next time I have the ladies over, I'll have the fan on pimp-speed. I don't even care if it's -10 degrees outside. This fan will be on, seducing the room and its inhabitants with its awesomeness!

A comparison of my kitchen when I first purchased my house and now:





The amount of time, effort, and money? Um, yea... doesn't matter because it was totally worth it!

Finally, I can follow up my original kitchen floor post. In case you're not up to speed, I ripped up my old kitcen floor about a month ago, after a very long battle, only to find that it was concealing a horrid layer of linoleum. Luckily, the linoleum was a total pushover, and I had him out of there in no time.

So, after days of strenuous work, I present to you my new kitchen floor. I had originally planned on putting down ceramic, but I decided against it at the last minute and went with a Pergo floating floor. (It was going to be far less work than ceramic.)

Got a new painting up finally.

What do you guys think? I like it; it's like abstract and boxy or something.



I've been told before that I'm good at art and that I'm very talented with my hands. I like to think this painting validates those claims.

I mean.... I clicked like 5 times on ebay to get this shipped to my front door!

Today, I drove to Menards, my most favored home improvement store, to get some stuff for the house.

I bought a load of baseboards for my kitchen. I had to rip up the old baseboards in the kitchen on account of the new floor (pics of the new floor will be posted soon).

I got something close to 30 boards and roll them out to my 2-door Pontiac Grand Am, only to realize that I'm a jackass for thinking I could transport all of this wood in my car.

Nevertheless, with a little pluck, moxy, and grit, I managed to fit it all in.



Anyway, I had 2 pieces that didn't actually fit into the car, so I had to hang them out of the driver's side window at an angle while holding onto them so the wind didn't blow them around. It was pretty awesome because I looked like I was jousting.




It's a good thing, too--I had a posse of motorcycle thugs come at me. I think they wanted the Garter hanging from my rearview mirror.



Naturally, I put them all down with the joust.

So I got pissed today after a long day of work at the ol' office. I needed to vent out my anger on something. I grabbed a hammer and a crowbar on my way into the house... The first thing I spot is my kitchen floor, which I hate with a passion.