Oh So Easy!

Tomorrow the handyman guy will be at our place to install the new portable dance floor we bought. Supposedly, installing the floor was a quick task for two people (actually the instructions said 'two men' but I'm not sexist). It even went so far as to call the task 'easy'. I've got this funny thing. When something says 'easy installation' I expect the installation to be - well - easy. Unfortunately, I often find that the easy being discussed must be some new, foreign sort of easy. The kind of easy that's really hard. Maybe it's Bizzaro Easy or something.

The floor we ordered is small, a ten by ten, and the plan is to set it up in our living room to help cushion our joints while we practice swing dancing. According to the instruction manual (which, by the way, didn't actually come with the floor but had to be downloaded as a PDF from the company website) to install the floor you simply snap the pieces together and if they don't fit together easily you use a floor tool to help with the process.

What floor tool? Did they mention a floor tool? Is a floor tool included? The answers, in order, are: who knows, no, and nope. Apparently this legendary floor implement, like the Arc of the Covenant and the Yeti is oft spoke of but seldom seen. There are rumors of remote tribes in the Sahara worshiping at the Shrine of the Floor Tool but modern archeology believes this to be here say and myth. To put it simply, I ain't got no stinkin' floor tool.

Improvisation led us to using a claw hammer to lever up the floor so that we could slide it together. This practice kind of works, well - that is until you want to put more than two sections of the floor together. At that point the flooring gets too heavy to lift and when you put one piece in, the others tend to get misaligned. We placed five of the nine floor squares before giving up.

So, tomorrow around 2 PM the guy from Handyman Connection will be by to give it his best shot. I'm sure he'll have a better go at it than I did. At least I hope so! I wouldn't wish my experiences in floor land on my worst dancing nemesis!