Jan 01 2008
Floorin’ and Hobblin’
Even though I’ve been writing about putting brick on the house, I want to back up and tell you that when you buy your plans, buy as many as you can afford at the beginning. The builders you interview will want a copy and everywhere you go after that, they will want a copy of the plans. The foundation people, the plumbers, the wall board people, the electrician will all want a copy of the plans. As our builder said if you got twenty-four copies of the plans he could use twenty-four copies. We got ten copies and didn’t end up with a copy we could keep, so if I were going to do it over I’d get twelve to fifteen copies.
Now, off we go to the flooring store! When we went to the flooring store we had specific ideas in mind. Having seven dogs at the time we wanted flooring that was easy to clean and wouldn’t show dirt. So we chose a tile for the kitchen that was a gold color, pine laminate for the dining room, living room, and foyer going down the hallway. We chose carpet for the family room and the bedrooms that we believed wouldn’t show the dirt. At the same store we chose our wall paints. We chose moss green for the family room, dining room, and the foyer and hallway. The rest of the house would be ‘dark sand’ and the trim in the whole house would be ‘light sand’. The kitchen counter tops and the bathrooms would have the same tile.
Things seemed to be going right on schedule when at about this time my husband took some time off from work to do some things in our house in Montgomery. There were several things that needed repair and there was a lot of stuff stored in the attic that needed to come down. When I left for work I remember telling my husband to be very careful climbing on ladders when no one else was home. I left for work. A couple of hours later my husband called me at work and said he had fallen off the ladder and he thought his ankle was broken! At the time I was really busy, so I said he should stay there and as soon as I could I’d come get him. He couldn’t wait for me to get there so he drove himself to the emergency room. Then he called me from the emergency room and said his ankle was so severely broken that he was being sent to another hospital for surgery. He asked me to come get him so he wouldn’t have to go by ambulance. By the time I arrived he had had a shot of morphine and was ready to be transported to the other hospital. In hindsight I wish I had told them to take him by ambulance because getting him in my truck, then in the hospital wasn’t easy to say the least.
This injury was far more devastating than just that my husband wasn’t able to make repairs to the house in Montgomery. He wasn’t able to get around easily on crutches. All of the running around we needed to do was now hampered by the cast and crutches. We had the lightening store and the cabinetry store yet to go but I’ll let you think about how my poor husband was now hobbling around on crutches in a cast that he couldn’t put weight on.
