diary of a floor

i had been covered up for so long. i was glad that i was going to finally get a chance to breathe and shed my filthy, stained, stretched out skin. even so, i knew the process would be painful. to begin with, all the furniture that had been weighing on me for a few years needed to be moved off. once my sections were clear, my outer layer of skin needed to be torn off. after it was rolled up and hauled out for garbage pickup, my inner layer of skin needed to follow. because this layer is stapled to me, pieces of it stuck with the staples while the rest was getting rolled up and taken out.

all of these staples needed to be removed, along with the leftover pieces of my inner skin (often referred to as the carpet pad). needle-nosed pliers were the tool of choice, and some did not come out so easy. ouch!

here is one girl's job while all the work is being done on me.

as people walked around on me, the staples and pad pieces often stuck in the bottoms of their shoes.

once all the staples were out, i needed to be swept so that i could be completely cleared off and prepared for a fresh, new inner layer of skin.

here is my new inner skin being put down. it starts off much larger than the section of me that it needs to cover. then someone goes around and trims off the edges. after it is the right size, they go around and staple sections of it so that it doesn't slide around.

here is one of the installers bringing in a large roll of outer skin for me.

here is what it looks like after the edges have been trimmed in the same manner as my inner skin.

sometimes there isn't a large enough piece of skin to accommodate my section. so two pieces of skin need to be 'glued' together. this is the iron tool that is used. there is a sticky tape that goes on the underside of my skin and the iron melts the glue on this tape and this keeps the two pieces of skin together.

after everything is cut to size and glued together if necessary, then my outer layer of skin needs to be stretched. this large tool with a pad on the back is used to stretch it.

after everything is stretched, then one of the installers kindly vacuumed off the excess dust and debris from my outer skin. how nice of him!

i sure get played on a lot more now, and i really love my new clean skin!