Days of work done in last-minute maneuvers – Albany Times Union

Home improvement projects can resemble a military maneuver one miscalculation and everything is lost. I didn't want my decision to recarpet our stairs, hallway and bedrooms to be my Waterloo, so we prepared for the new carpet installation like we were preparing for battle. As everyone knows, winning a battle takes discipline, organizational skills and a plan. Unfortunately, I don't have any of those things. But I do like being in charge and giving orders, so I made myself general and rallied the troops to clear out the stuff that had accumulated in the bedrooms over the years.

It did turn out to be a battle a battle over where to put everything. When I ordered the carpet, I was told to expect installation in three to four weeks. Normal people would have used that time to sort through their things in order to avoid a last-minute rush. My family understands the concept of normal people, we're just not sure how it applies to us. That's why we waited until three days before D-Day before we started moving things out of the bedrooms.

OK, we didn't really start until two days before D-Day because the first day we talked about it a lot, then we looked at everything in the rooms and agreed it was going to be a ton of work. Actually, if I'm going to be perfectly honest, we only gave ourselves one day to prepare because two days seemed like more than enough time and we like to think we do our best work under pressure. I'm sure that's what Eisenhower would have done.

I didn't think it would be a problem, though, because I'd made a brilliant tactical decision to not have the master bedroom recarpeted. That would give us a place to put everything from the other bedrooms. The tactic seemed slightly less brilliant when our bedroom quickly filled up and we had a lot more things to clear out. So we made dozens of trips up and down the stairs carrying our treasured possessions, until the dining room and then the living room were filled. At least Hannibal got to use elephants.

Still, we soldiered on. Well, most of us did my son went AWOL a few times to play video games but we were making progress. Closets were emptied, bookcases were cleared and refugee stuffed animals were relocated to a safe spot. Ideally, all the outgrown clothes and toys would have already been donated, so we wouldn't have to waste a lot of our time and energy moving them around. Ideally, I also wouldn't wait until the last minute to do everything.

That night it was hard to sleep, surrounded by all the stuff from our kids' rooms, including Felicity an American Girl doll from the Revolutionary War period. She stood sentry while I slept, her vacant, soulless eyes unreadable beneath her tricorn hat. I doubt George Washington had to sleep under such difficult, and creepy, conditions. If he had, the Revolutionary War may have turned out differently and today we'd all be speaking English.

We suffered a surprise attack the next morning when the installers arrived an hour earlier than expected. Didn't they know I needed every minute I could get to clear out the stuff that I forgot was under the beds? I had no idea where I was going to put those things and was about to wave a white flag, when I remembered the bathtub had yet to be used as a storage space. Problem solved.

There was a momentary setback when the installers moved the bookcase from my daughter's room to reveal a very dark area on the carpet that was, I'm sure coincidentally, the exact same size and shape as the bookcase. Within the rectangle there were a variety of small twigs, pebbles, bits of fluff and press-on jewels. The installers looked at me, waiting for orders on how to proceed with an area capable of harboring a village of tiny lifeforms. I summoned my inner William Tecumseh Sherman and ordered them to spare nothing and rip it up from wall to wall. I chalked up the potential deaths of hundreds of innocent dust mites to collateral damage.

Now that most of the upstairs has new carpet, I'll eventually want new carpet in the master bedroom, too. But that means repeating the process and I'm not sure it's worth it. Floor is hell.

Betsy Bitner is a Capital Region writer. bbitner1@nycap.rr.com.

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Days of work done in last-minute maneuvers - Albany Times Union