Fear, Possibility, and Great Expectations

On Monday I was painting and listening to the Invisibilia podcast. The topic was fear. The show's hosts interviewed a woman who has a rare brain condition where her amygdala has been compromised by calcium deposits, resulting in the inability to feel fear. The podcast asked the question, 'What would you do if you had no fear?' Limitless possibilities! The program went on to talk about snakes and social anxiety and trying to abolish fear by facing it head-on. Which brings me to my next point.

We are afraid to lay our flooring. Or maybe fear isn't the best term. We don't scream when we think of it. But we don't want to do it wrong, so we avoid it. The planks are sitting in the corner of our dining room in a pile. An organized mountain of limitless possibility. Sometimes I secretly hope to walk downstairs one morning and find it all magically self-installed.

Due to the unlikelihood of that materializing… 
We began ripping the linoleum up a day or so ago. We saved our giant cardboard microwave box for all of the trash.

There are two layers of linoleum. It is sticky, gross & difficult to rip up. At one point, I was getting cocky because I got a big sheet to come off, then the next section I tried to pry up {which must have had extra glue underneath} took much more effort. It was coming up in tiny dollar bill sized pieces.  Andrew double checked online to make sure there wasn't some fancy tool we'd overlooked that would help us out. But his search lead to one common thread/consensus: Removing linoleum is a by-hand job that is tedious & terrible.

My dad would say this activity was "character building."

We didn't want to spend our {entire} Saturday doing that, and our arms & hands were sore. If you looked at our kitchen right now, you would probably think we worked on it for about 15 minutes and then got busy doing something else. In reality we worked on it for hours. We ripped up around 1/3 of the kitchen area, then called it a day. Taking a break from that fun, today I've been going around priming & painting the baseboards white. Baby steps.

Some parts of this project yield bigger results than others, but we're in it for the long haul. And now that the floor looks so crappy we have no choice but to continue with things and install the Pergo. At least that is the trick we are attempting to play on ourselves…

Expectations can predict a great deal about the success or failure of a DIY project* 

*for more on that, check out this story - another episode of that podcast I mentioned earlier. Fascinating!