It's appropriate that, while I struggle with the bits and bytes of template HTML and Moveable Type's nifty Perl modules, I am also--still--in the process of painting rooms and refinishing floors. Late yesterday I removed the last of the horribly misplaced linoleum from the ground floor hallway.
Linoleum should only be in two places: the kitchen and the bathroom. Nowhere else. Ever. When we moved in, there was linoleum in the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallway outside the bathroom, and the bedroom. The bedroom. Utter lunacy. Fortunately, like so much of the other "work" that had been inflicted on the place, the bedroom linoleum was poorly installed, just tacked down along the edges. This prompted a gleeful orgy of linoleum-ripping less than half an hour after we closed on the house.
Not so the hallway. There, inexplicably, former owner Drunken Biker had decided to use many, many nails to fasten the underlayment to the oak flooring beneath before applying the terrible self-adhesive squares to it. So, I was forced to deploy the amateur home renovator's ultimate weapon, the clandestine North Korean nuke of tools:
With this bar I peeled back well-adhered lineoleum. I smashed three-layer plywood. I wrenched inappropriate nails from their oaken embrace. I held it aloft and danced upon the splintered remains of my enemy floor surface.
You should get one, just to have around. Even if you don't have anything to renovate just now, it's good for smashing skulls and prying apart frozen porkchops, too.
