When Life is Like Bull Durham

I know it's been a long time since I wrote a post for the blog. Do you know that movie Bull Durham? The infield is all around the pitcher mound-they have nothing but trouble-and Kevin Costner says: "Nuke's scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man's here. We need a live... is it a live rooster? We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose's glove, and nobody seems to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present. Is that about right? We're dealing with a lot of sh*t."

That about sums it up for us lately. It started out a few weeks back with the injury to Clifford's knee. We had to allow him time to get surgery and to heal-that took about two weeks. Then he had a death in the family-his wife's father passed from a massive heart attack. Like any death, you're just not ready to deal with that. Kim and I had to get Nicki moved back to school and all that goes with that, plus the pinched nerve in my neck has been keeping me on crawl. To add to the fire, we just could not get to point A to B fast enough. The great news is Clifford in now a granddaddy-his youngest just had her first child.

A couple real fun jobs came along for us. One was a black locust, and the other was a hickory install, sand and finish:

The black locust was planned to be a Monocoat finish, but the homeowner at the last minute decided that they wanted a semigloss polyurethane finish. Not that big of a deal for us, but it added the extra days of traveling to do the inner-coat abrasion between each coat. The job was an hour and 15 minutes away, so that added two hours and a half right there with the drive back. If we were able to just do the oil we could have been in and out in the one day with sand and finish. I think what scared them off from the oil was the flat sheen. Here are some photos:

I think the key is to really look at the rich color that comes out with the black locust. This is our second or third job with it; it sure looks good when it's down. The homeowner was absolutely thrilled with the work and as you can see from the photo, we had to match into the old existing black locust that they installed many years ago. What made that task complicated was that the old flooring was cupped, and they never knew that it was cupped until I explained what cupping is.

The other dilemma on this job was that the old flooring was from a remodel, and now the new flooring is the third remodel job on the same house. So with all of that remodel work, and (truthfully) with the homeowners doing a lot of the work themselves, they did not think ahead or plan ahead for different height adjustments in the wood flooring. Our flooring was 3/4 inch taller. The only thing we could do was make a reducer. We blended in the best we could and made sure that it just looked good.

Now, I think the real trouble for us has been the distance traveled from job to job. We've gone to Union City, Tenn.; Paris, Tenn.; and Humboldt, Tenn.; and now I just looked at a job in Clarksville, Tenn. One thing that never entered my mind as I took this task on of becoming a flooring contractor was that our name and our quality would spread as far as it has. If I'm 100 percent honest, there were a lot of growing pains in this process. It was never in my plan to pursue this for five years. I truly thought that I'd be back with a manufacturer in a year or maybe two years. Maybe sometimes life will throw you a turn or a twist just to get your attention.