Fiber Dreams

Having an office at home is, overall, a wonderful thing. I get to put my desk where I want it. I have a window. That opens. I can listen to music that I like. Or sit in silence. I have a comfy chair. And a floor mat, that well, is past its prime. Way past its prime. By at least a few years.

It was fine when it was new. Marvelous, in fact. So much better than the old one. And much, much better than none at all. Casters don’t roll well at all on cut pile carpeting.

But this one. Well, at first it was fine. At some point it got a permanent indentation in one spot right next to where I wanted the chair, so that I always rolled into the hole, making it so that the chair was never quite where I wanted it to be. Then the plastic got stiff and broke. In that indentation. I put the pieces back and taped over them to hold them down.

When that tape wore through I put more tape on it. Then I taped a file folder to the mat over that spot. Later more tape was added. Somewhere along the way the mat cracked in other places. Those spots got taped back together, too. Recently I’d been thinking that it was getting time to put another file folder over the first one, as it was starting to get torn up a bit.

Several years ago or so Dave made himself a nice wood platform to replace his plastic mat. A year or so ago we bought the supplies to make one for me. The weather turned, he wasn’t in the mood to work on it, and eventually the plywood warped. A couple weeks ago we bought a new piece of plywood. This weekend was it. Saturday Dave pulled out the plywood, oak parquet floor tiles we’d gotten, and the glue. He shortened the plywood sheet by a foot so it’d fit better in here, and got to work.

Yesterday I got stuff up off my floor, vacuumed, took the old plastic mat out to the garage.

This is what was left of the mat when I came back. A few chunks of plastic…

… And an outline on the floor of where the mat used to be. That middle picture is of where the chunks of plastic were. The little dots in the carpet are from the spikes that helped to keep the mat in place.

After I went as far as I could by myself, Dave came down and together we moved my desk and computer out of the way. Amazingly, we didn’t have to turn the computer off, much less take it apart at all. The care we took in moving the furniture around was sufficient.

Next we brought my new floor through the front door, down the stairs, down the hall, and into my office. You can see my desktop tulips on my monitor—and my gorgeous new floor.

Almost everything has been put back where it belongs. I have a little bit of rearranging to do, as one set of cubes isn’t going back where it was. I have to stuff the books that were in it into other cubes. Grandma’s sewing table is now on the other side of my desk, 90° from where it was before. I’m not sure it’s going to stay there. But in the meantime, while I ponder its best placement—and for many happy years to come—I have a new floor to roll around on. It’s glorious.

Not to worry. Tomorrow I’m planning on a knitting post for you. You’ll be amazed how much I’ve gotten done on the figgy pudding socks. I must come up with a name for this pattern!

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