Okay, homeskillets.  Because I was super lazy yesterday I decided to do hard work today.  Flooring.  Which I have been dreading.  Mostly because I'm making it up as I go along, and I have no idea whether this method will work.

But look at how bad the floor looks now!  It looks like a place that a sick koala bear would go to bask in his own misery.  Something had to be done.

If you're a big doofus who hates measuring like me (and you have no right angles to work with, like me), you can make a pattern.  Like so!  You do it by taking pieces of cardboard and paper and taping them together in the room that you're going to be flooring, until it reaches all of the edges and is a perfect fit.  It looks stupid, but it's good for you.  Like yoga.

What I'm using for this floor is bamboo placemats that I got at the dollar store.  See?  Pretty nifty, huh?  To get the brown fabric edging off, I just pulled the stitches.  It can be tedious work, so I just found a youtube playlist full of Queen music and rocked out as I worked*.

Then it was time to fit it to the pattern.  I taped the placemats to a big piece of cardboard, traced my pattern, and cut.  Cutting bamboo is tricky, evil business.  It's hard to turn corners with your scissors without splitting the whole piece.  What I do is just make horizontal cuts, then vertical cuts, and I let the piece come out that way, rather than trying to turn my scissor.

When you glue, make sure it's flat, squish it with books if you have to.  If you have to make corrections, you can use some of your scrap and cut it to size.  I have a few slats that I'm going to replace.

And voila!  You have a room where the aforementioned koala bear can recover and have a cup of tea in peace**.

*this is related to whistling while you work, but with fewer cartoon birds
**the area rug is a potholder also found in the dollar store (two for one buck!)  The chair I got from my sister who went antiquing.  And the cup I've had for a while.