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Thursday, February 25, 2010

Some things you may need to know: I'm working on a house. Just the finishing touches. It makes a good first job as a contractor... my future career. (um, just kidding. about the career, not the house.)


What a beautiful bamboo floor!

and there's the other half of the room...



There happens to be another person in this situation. We'll call him my comrade in arms, or C.A. for short. So I've never laid flooring before, of any type. But I'm eager to attempt. LV thinks of bamboo laying as a geometry problem. Each bamboo piece is 3' long and 3 3/4" wide. The room is 209" long. The boards should be laid down as follows, start at one end, and the last board in the row cut to fit. The remnant should then start row two, run to end cut the last board to fit. This pattern should be drawn out to ensure that what results is a pleasing pseudo-random array of boards. (And please don't whine that truly random is better. Truly random has only a slight chance of being aesthetically pleasing.) Chances are this plan will, in a square room, result in a repeating pattern along with minimizing measurements taken, cuts made, and boards wasted. Right? Paper, please. Pen, please.

CV says... that's not how you lay bamboo. (Granny-- if chickens lay eggs, can I lay bamboo?) Chalk lines and hydraulic staple guns are how you lay bamboo.

But, how do you know what's going to happen at the end of the row? What about the lengths of boards you can't use? And why not do a nice hexagonal pattern in the first place?

It turns out that once I managed to squash all my theoretical floor laying schemes I actually make a pretty good floor layer. Er, I was measuring and cutting, but still, the first day went well. And they only got squashed because we're on a timeline. It's LV & CA, 1700 sq ft and 15 days. Okay, THAT sounds unimpressive. So I'm going to add that there's a ton of other, very, very impressive tasks that we'll be accomplishing in those 15 days.

My new workshop.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yes, dear granddaughter, even though you are not a hen you can lay bamboo, as in lay down your ploughshares (Israeli peace song). But if you are going to be a serious student of French, you need to spell cul-de-sac properly.
Good luck on the new house!

February 26, 2010 12:09 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

P.S. Vocabulary Comment: Did you really mean to use the verb "squash" (crush or sqeeze something with force so that it becomes flat, soft, or out of shape) or the verb "quash" (reject as invalid, especially by legal procedure)?

Granny

February 26, 2010 2:39 PM  
Blogger LAV said...

I meant to use "squash," just a figurative use of the definition. But quash would have been a good choice.

February 26, 2010 8:00 PM  

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