On the Floor
The Home Depot 1 - 2 - 3 Flooring book is riveting and a must read for anyone who needs to lay down a new floor of almost any kind. I've been in it deep for a good part of the day, hoping it will impart all the secrets of putting down a ceramic tile floor. Even though neither I nor my beloved has ever laid tile before, we trust the book to help us through. For we are book people. I, however, believe I trust books to teach me things more than my dearest does. I recall, long ago when we were in the new boyfriend/girlfriend stage of our relationship, he asked me if I knew how to play chess. Why yes I did, I learned from a book. He declared, and he may dispute me on this but I have the better memory, that one could not learn how to play chess from a book. Well, why not? I am of the mind that I could build my own space shuttle if I had a book to tell me how. Of course a chess game ensued. I lost but I put up a good fight, good enough that my dearest conceded that one could indeed learn to play chess from a book. The flooring book is one of the more useful how-to books I've read, at least at this stage of the game when we are still pre-floor. How useful it will be when we are deep into mortar and tile will be a different story. But today it is serving it's purpose, pumping us up with step-by-step instructions and photos of just how easy it is. We've put down the leveling compound and our morale is high. It is because of the tile floor that I will not be able to begin reading Mrs. Dalloway today as my eager self of yesterday planned. You see, the floor we are working on is in the basement as is our library. Since the hallway and bedroom where the new floor is going had to be emptied of all of its contents, some ended up in the neighboring laundry room and some ended up in the library. The biggest hindrance to retrieving the book, however, is the twelve boxes of ceramic tile stacked in the doorway of the library. There is no getting round them or over them so Mrs. Dalloway will have to wait until tomorrow or the next day depending on how trustworthy the flooring book turns out to be.
