Tuesday, September 19, 2017

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

24 comments:

  1. 1. My house has no shoe molding and I'm suddenly not OK with that. I was living in ignorant bliss, not knowing what I was missing. Now I must have shoe molding...but probably in my next house because broke. And lazy.
    2. How many Mean Girl quotes will Eli incorporate into posts? The limit does not exist.
    3. I'm telling you, extremely flattered, but still married.

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  2. I'm seriously so proud of you right now.

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  3. So many math words I almost gagged. But then I remembered, I actually kind of like math.

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  4. I know you probably said before but where did you get the desk and do you have any ideas about where I can get on in Michigan. It's exactly what my husband is looking for for his office.

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    1. I ordered it through Crate & Twice Up the Barrel. I had been eyeing it for months but it was eleventy billion dollars so I couldn't justify buying it. Then I found a super good deal (it was only eleventy million dollars instead of eleventy billion). Now I can't afford food or shelter. But I have a great desk.

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    2. So now that I've figured out how much the desk cost, I can now divide from eleventy billion to find a conversion. One life goal accomplished ✅

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    3. Well, if $1,700 is eleventy billion and you got it on sale for eleventy million then you should just divide by a thousand since there are a thousand millions in a billion so it should have cost you $1.70. If you paid any more than that you definitely got ripped off.

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    4. Yeah - I looked it up on the site and showed it to him. He loves it but says there is no way he's paying that much for a desk. I pointed out that you're a lawyer with no kids other than your dog and he says yup - you can afford it! :)

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    5. You should definitely keep an eye on it if you like it. Maybe you will find an eleventy million % off deal like I did. As you can see from Anonymous's calculations above, that means that I paid $1.70 for it, which is really a pretty good deal if you think about it.

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  5. It looks really great, you should be proud of yourself! Also, that desk is amazing! (But not as amazing as your hair today.)

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  6. Did Skylar ever decide on a med school??

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    1. He's in the interview process right now so it will still be several months.

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    2. He should go to Western Michigan University's School of Medicine. And you should visit him. I have a spare room either of you can use!

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  7. I'm on a roadtrip with friends right now and I'm in charge of the in car entertainment so I decided I would read the last few months of Stranger posts to everyone. You have some new fans. At several points people in the car were laughing so hard I thought we were going to get into an accident.

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  8. I'm not sure you want the hair of fleeing slave leader. Take the hair from the Greek god as well.

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  9. *sigh* That was my "laminated" joke you so callously reused without written permission from the MLB or Bonneville Communications or whoever. And as for better hair, well, I was once declared to have "the nicest hair in the mission" by my companion who called me Golden Arches. (We were barely out of the 90s, so hair parted in the middle was still a thing STOP LAUGHING!)

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  10. Know how you avoid the maths? Don't have flooring at all. Like me. My 'flooring' is the concrete slab the house was built in, as God intended. Oh yes He did! Didn't He admonish us to enjoy life and have fun? I may be paraphrasing, but I'm pretty sure it's in one of the Testaments.

    And I ask you, how many people do you know who do the maths and are happy? Hmmmmm?

    Like I said, no flooring equals God's intentions.

    Oh shit, I think I accidentally mathed...

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  12. The best part of shoe molding is the nail gun you get to use to install it. Mitering the corners sucks and DOES require calculus of which I have none.

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  13. I love it when you throw in Mean Girls references. Totally grool!

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  14. I'm pretty sure if your shoes are molding that's a BAD thing. But your baseboards look almost as great as your hair!

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