Holes

This is what the hole in our bedroom floor looked like.

For about 8 months now, we've noticed a significant dip in the floor (underneath the carpet) in our bedroom, right in the middle of the room. It was very hard to avoid. It was also, I noticed one day when I was downstairs, directly above the chandelier in the dining room. (Or what we call "the blue room" since we don't have any dining room furniture in it.) It appeared rather suddenly, and the kids, despite being threatened with a river dunking, enjoyed jumping into it. I had great trepidation about this hole, and even had dreams about it being filled with swarming termites chewing their way through our house. We didn't quite know how to go about exploring the problem, however, as we have wall-to-wall Berber (sp?) carpeting, and a very small bedroom crammed full of heavy furniture. Finally, Don sweet-talked a carpet-laying friend of his to come over and take a look. This meant the day before I had to clear off my dresser (no mean feat), carry all the drawers into the boy's room, take all the storage boxes from under the bed into the boy's room, strip the bed and put the blankets and comforter in the boy's room, put the end-of-the-bed bench into the boy's room, and hope like hell they wouldn't have to move my huge shelving unit, since I had loaded it up with everything from off the dresser. That morning, Don and I moved the mattresses into the boy's room, disassembled the bed, pulled the dresser into the hall...no wonder my back still hurts! So anyway, the guy came and pulled back the carpet, and it was no big deal. A small support piece had come off (the nail bent) and two pieces of the hardwood had dropped down. Nail the support back on, replace the boards, problem solved. Then, the best part, the guy fixed the carpet - by "kicking" it back into place. I don't know how many of you have ever seen a carpet being "kicked" but MAN, does it look painful. There's this tool that stretches the carpet flat, then you jam the end of it with your knee and it pushes the carpet under the baseboards. He did both walls in about 5 minutes. It was really something to see. So for the rest of the day I vacuumed places that haven't seen the light of day in 5 years, washed sheets and blankets, and put the room back together. Not a bad day's work.