This IS a story about our cats.  However, it starts with a home improvement progress report.

 

The big home project of creating the dedicated master bedroom is still in progress, but well along on its way. The walls are up and textured and painted. Our new vinyl plank flooring is in—such an improvement over that nasty old carpet that we lived with for the three years after moving in!  We have the master bath toilet and vanity in, right up to the fixtures, the lights, and a beautiful round mirror that echos the “nautical” round windows in the stairwell. The shower is even ready to tile.

 

Now remember: this is a story about our cats.

 

As to the flooring, the real accomplishment is that I managed to get the entire upstairs installed as a single continuous installation, rather than needing to do a threshold at the new master bedroom door. So the master bedroom and closet and bathroom are all continuous flooring. Furthermore, we took out all the old carpet in the great room, and now the vinyl plank flooring goes all the way from the master bedroom into the great room, as one continuous surface.

 

However: as of now, the great room floor is only about halfway done, with the rest bare plywood. Why not finish it out?

 

Well, the ORIGINAL plan was to TEMPORARILY install the flooring AROUND the kitchen (which is tiled), and live with that layout for maybe six months, or at most a year or two until we were ready to tackle the kitchen.

 

Cats? I’m getting there, trust me.

 

So picture, after a long day of me installing flooring and then spending a couple of painful hours removing the old tile fireplace hearth so the flooring could go right up to the gas fireplace, when Brian suggested: “Maybe we should just go ahead and take out the tile in the kitchen too.”

 

I describe my reaction as follows: Have you seen Raiders of the Lost Ark? Remember at the end of the movie when the bad guys’ faces melt and their heads explode? Yeah, picture that and you’ve got a good idea of my reaction to Brian suggesting—at that exact, exhausted moment—that we start also ripping out even more tile flooring!

 

So anyway, the state of our floor in the great room is… incomplete. The installation currently stops at the last moment before I would have to start cutting the planks to fit them around the kitchen. In the meantime, we are working on completing the master bedroom and master bath, so we can go ahead and move in up there and have at least that part of the overall home improvement completed.