Inch by Inch

I read a country living/prepper kind of internet forum regularly. One thread is "What did you do today to prepare for whatever...". Folks post about planting 50 acres of corn or building a root cellar or canning rutabagas.

Our big accomplishment yesterday was tearing up a corner of vinyl flooring.

Underwhelming, maybe. But for us, these past two months have been a series of baby steps. No, not even baby steps. More like first tri-mester, toes starting to develop steps.

• Locating the website that lists the local farmer who sells straw and getting a map to find his place--all for 10 bales for chicken bedding.  
• Calling and waiting for the plumber to fix the pressure tank so we can call around and find a used washing machine, which doesn't work at first so it has to be fixed.
• Cleaning up the debris from the fallen pine tree limbs only to have two more massive branches come down in as many days.

But mostly waiting for the sale of our former home so we have some money to really work on the to-do list.

But back to the floor.

We want a wood stove. While waiting for an estimate for installing a chimney (we did our last one ourselves and I don't want another crushed disc), we thought "Oh, easy-peasy first move--tear up the flooring in preparation for laying tile." Who would have thought that a piece of vinyl 5' x 5' would fight tooth and nail to stay on the floor. As the photo shows, it came off in layers, when it finally came off at all. We finally came to our senses and said "We've got to put down backerboard anyway, the layers can stay."

It looks crummy, took much longer than it should have, scraped our knuckles and hurt our backs, but it's progress. Real, tangible, step by step, inch by inch progress.