Shoe Molding

I finished putting the new laminate floors into my office and bedroom a few weeks ago and subsequently vowed to never do a day of work again in my life.

Well, the problem with this plan was that I wasn't really done with the project. There was still something called "the shoe molding" that had to be put in. 

I knew about this mostly because on one of my trips out to the saw on the driveway while installing the floors I ran into Mr. Perfect and lamented (or lamintated HA! I'm pretty sure I stole that joke from one of your comments in the last post on this topic. But I probably had better hair when I said it so it really landed) the fact that the edges of the floor where it meets the walls didn't look very good because of the little gaps and Mr. Perfect was like "you're an idiot. That's what shoe molding is for." Except he said it much less patronizingly than Matt, who confirmed that this was true when I walked back into the house and he gave me a lecture about how I've owned a home for three years and still somehow don't know what the hell shoe molding is.

For all other idiots out there, shoe molding is the little piece that runs along the bottom of the baseboard. I always assumed that it was actually a part of the baseboard and not a wholly separate piece. 

I told Matt that I would be expecting him to come back at his earliest inconvenience to install this for me but then a few weeks went by and I never heard from him. I was getting sick of seeing the unfinished job and truly did not want to become one of those people who lives with a permanently 95% complete home improvement project. 

So last weekend I said to myself I said "Eli. You can figure this out on your own. You have the biceps of a Greek God and the hair of Moses. And you are certainly competent enough to complete this project without Matt."

And so, after that self pep talk, I up and drove myself to Lowes, purchased two hundred billion dollars worth of materials, loaded up my car, and drove home. 

And THAT'S when I discovered that cutting shoe molding is the most complicated task I've ever attempted to perform in my life.

Y'all. It tested the full extent of my spatial reasoning skills. AND I DON'T EVEN SAY SPATIAL REASONING.

I know you think it sounds really simple, but it is not. You have to cut the corner pieces at a perfect angle and at the perfect length so they meet each other perfectly and perfect perfect perfect. And there are like 1,200 wrong ways to cut a piece. I found that out the hard way. 1,200 times.

I was trying to explain to Skylar that this was actually really really difficult and he told me that I was wrong and that this was actually really simple because all you have to do is take the square root of something and multiple it by its integer and take the pi of its exponent plus the logarithm of the derivative over the multiplicity divided by the limit does not exist!

And I was like "YOU ARE PROVING MY POINT SKYLAR."

Remember when we were in school and we were all whiny little pieces of crap and we were like "when am I ever going to use calculus" and the teacher never gave us an answer?

Well the answer is "one day when you are trying to cut shoe molding in your hundred-year-old house that doesn't have even walls and is probably haunted." 

Really missed the ball on that one, Mrs. Doty.

Eventually I figured out a system for doing this correctly and conceptually what I was doing made no sense but I learned that it was best to just not think about it too hard.

Finally I got this done all around the perimeters of each room and in the closets:

It may not look like much, but calculus was involved.

Also, Skylar has settled in.

He better doctor allll over that desk. 

~It Just Gets Stranger