The projects are tremendous and insane, especially for a one man team like yours truly. But life and projects must go on. Time is not on our side so continue we must. I am doing everything to this house what I had planned from the beginning, and most confirmed by the pandemic, or COVID19 as most of us know. 

When I purchased this house, the family and recreation rooms were carpeted. And in the 5 or so years we’ve lived here, the carpet had suffered extreme abuses, from my grands and especially from the drips of the tiny coconut fruits I love to chew. I guess they call those betelnut stains. In addition, this is a coffee house, it has to be obvious since we live in STARBUCKS country, and so we have coffee stains everywhere as well.  

So the plan since our purchase was to replace all the carpets with laminate flooring. Forgot to mention all three rooms upstairs except for my  room were carpeted too. Already replaced those a while back. What remains is one of the largest area in the house, the RECREATION ROOM.  And because of the scope of work involved, I had hired a contractor to do that.

Took me a while to hire a contractor because I had to scan social media and my neighborhood to find the right person/company to hire. I used google, yelp, homeadvisor, nextdoor, angi’s and so on to find the perfect contractor for me. Asked several companies including the obvious ones like Homedepot and Lowes for quotes on different projects to give me a good idea of how much the average cost is. I want to find that out myself instead of relying solely on numbers I get from social media. Those are also good for comparing and contrasting. 

Installation labor cost for laminate flooring turned out to be in the $3K range, which I thought was too much. This is for about 400 or so square footage of space. No wonder the DIY youtube videos are so popular. Who would spend 3k on labor? Unless, you TRUMPETIZE it, I cannot afford to loose 3k on labor. Oops, TRUMPETIZE is a made up word means you hire contractors and then leave them hanging without paying them. When they sue you, you sue them back until they run out of money. Hahahahahaha. Mr. Trump, according to the news and social media did that successfully on many occassions. Or he’ll just file for bankruptcy. Brilliant man!

Let’s forget Trump for a minute. Enough dramas. 

After spending hours, days and a couple of years looking for good contractors, I hired Mr. Elroy and his company to do the work for me. Mr. Elroy gave me a decent quote and told me he’d finish the job in no time at all. Never did I imagine my meeting with Mr. Elroy would turn out to be a story in itself. What a small world we have.