This weekend we made a few more inroads on the never-ending saga that is the downstairs floor. My dad came over Wednesday night with his air gun and showed Richard how to use it, shortly after I dashed out to the hardware store to see how many 12-foot lengths of quarter round I could stuff into my car (they only hung out the front window about a foot, so it worked out well). Richard and my dad nailed one strip onto the wall Wednesday night, just so he could see how it’s done, and then Richard decided to take Friday off and see how much more he could put down by himself. So by the time I got home Friday evening, the guest room and both downstairs closets had been finished, and what a difference it made.

Throughout this whole flooring process I have reminded myself that people do this sort of thing, by themselves, all the time, and it will turn out okay at some point. But for weeks now Richard and I have been silently looking at the floor, or more specifically at the uneven ends lining the walls, and second guessing our idea to do not just pay the extra several thousand dollars to have someone who actually had a clue do it for us. All of a sudden, the application of some baseboard edging, and it doesn’t look so bad.

So yesterday we spent working our way through the sizable stack of quarter round. Richard measured and cut and nailed and managed to trim out the bedroom area and the hexagonal reading room, while I spent the entire time scootching around on my butt, applying painter’s putty to fill in the cracks, so the transition between flat baseboard and curved quarter round looks perfect and seamless.

It looks awesome. We are, of course, not done, because this project will go on forever (or at least feel like it), but what has been accomplished looks amazing. As Richard put it, it now looks good enough that we might not be embarrassed to have people over. And it demonstrate completely why putty and baseboard are the very best things ever for the intrepid flooring do-it-yourselfer.