I’ve been staring at our carpet again, fixating on it with a significant level of loathing.

It’s hard not to stare at our carpet, because we walk and sit on it daily and occasionally roll around on it with our cats.

When we bought the house, I didn’t mind it and I really don’t mind it now, but we have ideas of things we want to do with it. Two people with long hair and two cats has made me realize that I hate vacuuming, but to remedy this is going to require work I’ve never done before.

For a while now, we’ve talked about ripping the carpet up and going with just the wood floors underneath. The thought started creeping up on us a few years ago, but funds often needed to be diverted elsewhere for various reasons, bolstering my ideas that adulting is stupid.

But now it’s starting to get serious again and I’m thinking it might make a nice early spring project.

I did my due diligence and researched how to do it and I feel pretty confident in the act of yanking up the carpet. I’m one of those people that’s really good at taking things apart so long as I don’t have to put it together again. Ripping up the carpet seems easy enough, but after that my confidence kind of jumps right off the table.

A various amount of equipment will have to be rented, which from what I can see will take up a good amount of the expense, provided there isn’t a lot of work that needs to be done on the floor itself — replacing boards where need be and so on.

That’s one of the sticking points that’s worrying me. I came out of high school comfortable in the fact that there are two things I will never be — a professional athlete and a woodworker.

Memory doesn’t serve me real well here, but I think I had at least one year of wood shop and by looking at the things I created, you would be able to tell pretty quickly that my struggles with woodworking came from just one year of woodworking. I made a birdhouse that was serviceable in that I deviated very little from the plan in front of me and birds risked their lives to live in it. The plan was cookie-cutter and hard to truly screw it up, not that I didn’t try with the feverish intent of a boy that also struggled with math.

Honestly, I’m starting to wonder how I even got out of high school at this point.

Nevermind the fact that so many of the machines we used were far bigger than I was. There was a fair share of intimidation in my woodworking that put me in a spot to easily be bullied by a table saw and lathe.

I guess it’s not fair to compare that kind of woodworking to fixing a floor, but it’s wood and I would be working on it so it’s close enough to bring back a bullying complex.

A long time back I remember my mom taking on the task of this ilk — floors, not bird houses. She has said she has complete confidence in my skills to handle this project, but apparently she refuses to note exhibit A of my skills — a chess board where absolutely none of the squares line up right.

I find myself getting excited about this all the same. We have wood in the bedroom and I absolutely love it.

Getting around the house will be interesting as our entire living room will be tucked into the kitchen and dining room, though I’m not entirely how that’s going to work. We just bought a massive couch not long ago and we have a fairly decent sized TV, among all the various other  things we have complicating the living room, so getting to the kitchen sink may require the skills of a gymnast, which means I’ll probably have to hire former Austin head gymnastics coach Mark Raymond. He’s always had confidence in my ability to fall into a foam pit and his gymnasts at the time were positively giddy over me trying. I suspect it was to laugh, but have no proof other than their continued insistence that I try.

I really feel that this kind of project shouldn’t be a problem, but then again thinking like this is why I’m often getting lost in the Twin Cities. Well it shouldn’t be too hard to get there … and then I’m in St. Cloud.