a whole new flor (part two: installation!)

Now that we have successfully installed our own modular carpet, I can safely say that if our current careers don't work out, Husband and I can make a living installing Flor carpets. We make an excellent team...but that is why we're married, after all!

And it's a darn good thing we spent our Friday night carpet-tiling, because New Couch came bright and early on Saturday morning--meaning we could rest on it for the remainder of the weekend. Pretty sweet!

Without further adieu, here's the finished product:

Tetris? An aerial view of the Midwest? Or modular, Modernist carpeting?

Two days later, it looks much more settled and fluffy. A few passes with the vacuum have lifted stray shag pieces, all but erased the lines between tiles of the same color, and generally made it look even more awesome.

Oh, and the couch is freaking amazing:

Please ignore the Sad Elephant in the picture.

I can't believe how far we've come in the last month!  But first, the story of Flor installation...
The biggest and most stressful part of the job was clearing the room of almost all furniture. I measured earlier in the week and knew that the couch and chair would both fit (snugly) in our front hallway. I hadn't pondered where everything else would go. The answer is: anywhere it would fit! For the sake of our good name, we won't show you what the rest of our apartment looked like between the hours of 8 and 11.

Once everything was cleared out, we had the cavernous living room we remembered from moving in:

Wow, you really are 18 feet long, living room!

You can just make out the vacuum crevice attachment on the far right, where Husband was going to town getting every last speck of dust behind the radiator. We didn't carpet under the radiator, but it was long overdue for a cleaning!

Next up, the fun part! We called up our design and then had a brief discussion about how we'd put it in. For reasons I can't recall, we laid it out upside down from how it appeared in the mockup. I think it had to do with the tiles we'd see while sitting on the couch.

In order to get the best idea of where it would sit on the floor, we started tiling the length and width of the room:

You see, we originally planned to center the rug two feet from all the walls, creating an 8x14' rug. Since Flor tiles are measured metrically, we couldn't achieve such a size without cutting tiles, and we were more married to the idea of uncut tiles than we were to exactly 2 feet of space around the rug. So we decided that we would place the tiles 2 feet from the couch wall in order not to waste a bunch of our pretty carpet under the couch.

Here's where the Flor people say a carpenter's square comes in handy. And here's where I say a carpenter's square means nothing if your room isn't square. Our building is at least 80 years old and our rooms aren't exactly square. We found--thankfully--that they weren't far off. Keeping the tiles on the window end of the room the same distance from the wall, we discovered that the tiles on the long end would not line up along the floor plank as we'd hoped. But they only varied by about an inch as we went down the room, and were magically still 2 feet from the wall when we got to the end of the room.

So we continued on to complete the pattern, with me on the floor placing the tiles and Husband checking the design and handing me what I needed. The only challenge was making sure all the nap was going in the same direction. Flor conveniently provides arrows on the bottom of the tiles so you can make sure all the nap goes in the same directly (or two different directions if you're installing it "parquet-style," which we sort of were, as some tiles were rotated 90 degrees). Unfortunately, the ones on the brown tiles were pretty tough to see! Husband would stand there for a few minutes squinting at one before giving up and handing it to me, at which point I would have equally as much trouble finding the little arrows. With teamwork, we did find all of them, and our nap is happily all going in the same direction on the shag pieces (for easier vacuuming!).

When all the tiles were installed, we sat back, proud of our accomplishment:

Here I'm pretending to place a tile because we forgot to take pictures as we laid the tiles.

We were both pretty nervous about sticking our "Flor dots" onto the bottom of our tiles. You see, Flor tiles don't adhere to the floor (yay!), they provide large stickers to stick them to each other. But we were a little scared to stick them together all crooked and cockeyed and end up ruining our super-cool carpet.

So first we decided to split up and each stick from either end. Then we both started shifting our tiles so much we got scared we'd meet in the middle and it wouldn't be pretty. By "so much" I mean that we had shifted our tiles approximately 3 millimeters, by the way.

But we gave up on that and worked together. I would stick the Flor dot to one corner of a tile, and Husband would pull up the corners it met and we'd arrange them together. You can move the Flor dots for about two hours before they become permanent, so we had some wiggle room. And wiggle we did. Once we finished all the corner Flor dots, I went around the edge while Husband perfected the center ones. By the end of our task, we discovered that we needed to put the striped tiles down first, otherwise they would cover where the shag hung off and look a little wonky due to their difference in pile height.

In under two hours, we had put together a rug! This is how I celebrated:

In order to keep ourselves from going insane, we went out to dinner at 10:30 at night. A wonderful perk of living in New York is that we can do that.

I wanted to move the furniture back immediately, but Husband wisely suggested we wait out the 2 hours while the Flor dots still had some wiggle. Since we couldn't really use the rest of our apartment, dinner it was.

We came back and haphazardly placed furniture in a manner that left enough space for the couch to arrive the next day and, truly exhausted, went to bed.

We are delighted with the result, which we got to show off to a dear friend on Sunday, and we will now extoll the virtues of Flor to anyone who will listen (and even people who won't). We're pondering another Flor design for our hallway, too!

Next up: lamps, wall art, and thoughts about tree-friendly, Modernist Christmas trees!