Allure flooring is 15% off this week (until March 7th).

I bought my first three boxes on February 11th, less than a month ago, so I headed over to the store with that receipt, hoping for a retroactive discount. 15% is a lot! It’s basically a ‘buy four, get the fifth free’ promotion. As I’d hoped, Home Depot does honour sales prices for purchases up to a month back. Their process is pretty funny. They refunded the original flooring, put the money back into my bank account, charged me for a total of six boxes at the discounted price, then took money back out of my account.

While I once thought I might need seven boxes to do the whole rig, I’m now almost certain that five will do it. I bought a sixth just so I wouldn’t have to run back out; Home Depot would refund me that purchase if needed.

Thanks, Home Depot, you were the bright spot in my day.

I have discovered what my wits’ end looks like:

Let’s just say that justifies pulling up all the old flooring and taking out the bucket chairs.

I am seriously at a loss now. I can’t figure out where the water’s coming in from. All I know is that it has soaked through the subfloor and well into the wall, the bottom inch of which has rotted through.

Before embarking on the renovations, I thought I did a pretty good job of making sure there were no structural issues that needed looking at first, but I obviously failed. This entire section needs to be gutted, dried out, cleaned up, and rebuilt before I can even think of buying the rest of the Allure I need I need to finish the floors. Forget anything else; the renos have ground to a halt. I have plywood left from the doors to finish the new counter, but that’s it.

I spent my entire emergency fund getting the brakes fixed last fall. There’s nothing left for something like this, not with the drive north looming ahead of me. It’s a good thing I decided to do the floors; I would have probably not found this problem otherwise until it became an even bigger issue, but the fact is that I have embarked on something I don’t have the means to finish.

Well, I guess I’m going to go have a meltdown then come up with some sort of plan to deal with this.