My dad rocks!

Here's my new tile floor in my basement room, courtesy of my dad. Sid, the cat, admires the tile too. I will have to put on a baseboard, but I've not yet gotten to it.

(Though it looks wet in the picture, the floor is dry. It's just dusty.)

Like many folks in Southern Wisconsin, we got way too much rain in August, enough to flood my finished basement. The basement carpet was completely underwater, and I figured it would not dry before molding, so I decided to remove the carpet. I moved all the furniture upstairs. And then, with my husband's help, a utility knife, and a crowbar, we pulled up the carpet. It had been glued to the floor. Yuck. Fortunately, water being the universal solvent that it is, helped loosen the glue.

The next steps were cleaning and drying. Pretty much every time it rained, we went downstairs with our wet vac and sucked up the water. And I kept mopping as well. The goal was to keep the water away from the utility room, where the furnace lives, and the laundry room.

I was exhausted and frustrated, so my mom and dad offered to come help me out. They also came up to help my sister whose roof leaked in the same storms that flooded my basement. What's significant about their arrival is that they live down in Florida, not exactly close. I'd decided that ceramic tiles would be a good permanent solution in the basement. If the basement floods again, I can easily mop/wet vac the tiles. Then I went over to Menards, where I got great deal on the tiles. Of course, I would highly reccommend to anybody looking to buy tiles that they have somebody help them. Tiles are heavy. Boxes and boxes of tiles are heavy. You need a lot of tiles for a basement.

So anyway, Mom and Dad came to visit with their tile saw, and helped me tremendously by laying tile in the basement. Yay, Mom and Dad rock!

Dad and I also figured out something kind of cool. Using two laser levels makes laying tile a cinch.