Forwards and occasionally sidewards – everyday musings of life

With the hall, bathroom, and utility room floors completely cleared for the fitters, we were quietly buzzing. This is the very last job of our home renovation project. By Friday, after a grand total of 78 days, we will officially be finished.

Knowing we would be strictly banished from these zones while the work was underway, Karen and I were careful to remove everything we might possibly need over the next three days. Well, almost everything… I forgot to rescue the dog’s food.

Flooring tradesmen, as I’ve come to learn, come in two entirely distinct species.

First, you have the carpet layers. These guys are full-on gladiators, permanently ready to do battle with unruly, heavy rolls of carpet. It starts with the ‘vehicle extraction hold’—a grip so powerful a professional wrestler would weep. Once locked in this submission hold, the carpet is powerless to use its colossal dead weight to resist. It is wrestled through the front door and hauled into position.

Heavy Drum & Bass pumps from a battered DeWalt music box (a mandatory piece of site kit) like a tribal war beat, urging on the carpet wrestlers as they grapple with their hessian-backed opponent. The fight is ruthlessly one-sided. Armed with razor-sharp Stanley knives, they carve the carpet with laser-like precision into every alcove, corner, and doorway—its final resting place.

Pumped up after the bout, the wrestlers puff out their chests, high-five, demand another mug of five-sugar tea, hoist the DeWalt boombox onto their shoulders, and practically dance out of the room. On to the next conquest.

The guys who lay Luxury Vinyl Tiles (LVT), however, are a completely different breed. I doubt they have ever been in the same room, house, or even postcode as a carpet layer.

LVT fitters are quiet, subtle, methodical, and profoundly calm. In fact, if you didn’t know they’d arrived, you’d miss them entirely. They move in silence, using black magic, smoke, and mirrors to transform bare subfloors into masterful works of wood-effect art.

Spending most of their working lives on their knees, they seem to communicate in a secret language with the tiles, ensuring these flexible, hard-wearing strips are laid with mathematical precision. These guys are the fine artists of the flooring world.

Because mere mortals are strictly banned from entering their workspace while the magic is happening, we never actually get to see them in action—only their finished masterpieces left behind for us to admire. In fact, they work so silently that they could be laying tiles in the hall right now as I type this… which presents a slight tactical issue, as Moog’s dinner is currently trapped on the wrong side of the threshold.