Working my way through college, I found it easier to do odd jobs that required manual dexterity rather than sitting an office since most of my days were spent sitting down, listening to lectures, doing assignments and the like. I felt that my muscles needed the exercise and the pay for manual labor was good and had a flexible time. A friend of mine had a construction and home development company and offered me a part time gig installing laminate flooring. At that time, laminate flooring was new technology, something different and interesting to do.
As compared to installing hardwood flooring, it was much easier and simpler and the net effect and look was likewise comparable to hardwood flooring itself, though this will always be debated by hardwood purists. Installing laminate flooring was even relatively easier on my part since the houses that I was to work on were new ones, those recently built by my friend and his company so in essence, all I had to do was go to the room designated, get the square footage, add around 5 to the area, and then get the materials and work on it. I would work on an almost completed room which was almost done save for the installation of the electrical outlets and the base boards.
Most of the time, I would choose to work on odd hours like lunchtime or on weekends and Sundays when nobody was there. Installing laminate flooring on a whole house could take a day or so. It wasn’t hard to do but the trick there was getting the right measurements and maximizing the cut of the laminated flooring. Since I was essentially given a full roll of laminate flooring, I would find the best way to cut the pieces to get a lower percentage of wastage. To me it was like solving a non verbal puzzle, akin to those pieces of plastic strips which could be made into different shapes, some toy which was popular at the start of the 80’s decade whose name I fail to recall. A lot of the time spent was actually not in the installation but in the preparation process.
Though I had the measurements since most of the units were the same, it was the cutting of the laminate flooring that took most of the time initially. Then once I had a couple of houses done, I decided to precut most of the pieces and then just label and number them for quick reference. Every Sunday, I would start around 9 am doing the second floor first. It was a lot of squatting, kneeling and bending work so I would take a five minute break every hour and a half. After a while, I just wanted to finish the work on a per house basis and then take my break after a house was done. It wasn’t as easy as I thought. Still it felt nice to see the product of your work.
One time I got to view one of the houses I had done as it became a model house and showroom of sorts. The blend of the right furniture and finishing details and interiors made the house more than tempting to purchase. Installing laminate flooring did its part to make the house more livable.
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