Welcome to Oak-Land. Enjoy Your Stay.

The new floor got delivered today. Too bad we missed it.

Kathy and I have decided to install hardwood floors on the third floor. And when I say "install" I mean "stand around and watch other people do it." The first two floors of this house are wall-to-wall hardwood, but the third floor never had that. It just has a quick-and-dirty coat of brown paint over the redwood subfloor. And for the last 30-odd years, there's been carpet over that. Once we pulled out the carpet a few months ago, it exposed the nasty paint-splattered subfloor underneath. Not nice.

So we decided that the third floor should match the other two. Trouble is, they don't make olde tyme hardwood floors any more. Downstairs, it's all American white oak in 2-1/4" strips. But modern floors are generally 4-inch or 6-inch boards. We wanted to match the downstairs floors as closely as possible, which turns out to be a challenge.

We visited three local flooring stores and talked to the friendly salespeople. They were all very nice and showed us some alternatives. The first one said he'd send out an estimator to measure the rooms and give us a quote.* The second one said she'd call us when the appropriate samples came in. And the third one said, "Great, no problem, when can we start?" We went with the third one.

They found us some US-grown white oak that comes pre-stained to an almost perfect match with our other floors. Better still, the wood was on sale. And they could deliver it in a week. Sign here, hand over the deposit, and we'll see you in a few days.

Nothing. We don't hear anything for a week, and start getting nervous. Then -- of course -- while Kathy and I are away for lunch we get a frantic phone call from the flooring guy. "We're out in front of your house but nobody's home. Can you let us in?" Uh, dude. Did you think to maybe call us first?

Fortunately, we're just a few blocks away at our favorite Mexican restaurant (one of the pleasures of living downtown), and could walk back home in 10 minutes. Enough time for the delivery guys to park their big truck and start unloading onto the sidewalk.

It took three guys about a dozen trips each to haul all the wood up to the third floor. Better them than us. Then they open the boxes to let the wood "breathe" and acclimate to the room. They'll let it sit there for about a week before beginning the installation proper.

In the meantime, we have to get all the upstairs rooms ready. When you're getting a new floor put in, you have to remove all the furniture and everything from the rooms. And I mean everything. You can't leave things sitting around because, well, it's a floor. It's not like painting, where you can just cover stuff up. So everything gets moved either downstairs or into the bathroom (which already has a tile floor and isn't getting resurfaced). It's like packing up to move but without the boxes.

We also have to remove all the baseboards from around every room. We don't mind that part because we wanted to replace the baseboards and door moldings anyway. They don't match the ones downstairs. These are simple pine boards painted to look like stained wood. Our plan is to replace them with replicas of the molding on the lower floors. That's going to be a big project. For another day.

*P.S. Part of me hopes that the salesman from the first flooring store will call back in about two weeks to schedule that estimate. Sorry, fellah, but your competitor already measured, delivered, and installed the entire floor in less time than it took you to send out your helper. Better luck next time.