This post actually comes from a lesson that I have learned while doing renovations at my house. We are doing everything ourselves. We have painted, removed carpet, removed base boards, and the list goes on and on... We even decided to lay the new flooring on our own. My father-in-law is a jack of all trades and he has layed flooring in many different settings, so it only seemed natural to have him guide us in the right direction with our flooring. I guess I should say what we are laying, we are putting down wooden laminate floors. He came over last weekend and got us started. We got a few rows down and we were feeling that what we were doing was just a "little" too difficult. We have watched many home improvement shows and it never appears that laying this type of flooring is as difficult as we were making it. We continued with trial and error for a good 2 hours. We were about to give up when we got the bright idea to youtube how to lay our flooring. After pulling up a video and watching it several times, we noticed that we were laying the flooring backwards (YES BACKWARDS...JUST SO YOU KNOW THERE IS A FRONTWARDS AND A BACKWARDS!!!) So we decided to start laying the floors the way that the video showed. We had to pull up everything that we had already done to correct our mistakes. We got several rows down again and we started to thing (again) that this was still just a bit harder that we had thought it should be. (So if you are keeping track we have been working for about 4 hours now with LITTLE progress.) We watched the video again and there was something that the gentleman in the video kept saying ( I think he said it 4 times in the video and we watched it about 6 times, so yes...we heard this statement about 20 times). He kept saying: "There are several ways to lay this type of flooring, so make sure you consult your flooring instructions that came with your flooring". About the 20th time that we heard this statement, we decided to actually find the directions and read them. There was one key step that we were missing, so we had to pull up everything that we had just put down and start the process all over again. THE THIRD TIME WAS THE CHARM!!! We slowly started making progress towards getting our flooring layed properly. After reading and following the directions, the process seemed to go much more smoothly. It was brought to my attention that "if we had read the directions before we started we would be done with the floor by now"....I couldn't argue with that fact... And all of the sudden it hit me, I tell my students several times on a daily basis that they need to read their directions on their assignments. I tell them that everything will go better if they do that first thing....I started to think (WELL YEAH YOU BIG DUMMY, Practice what you preach!!!). Of course, when I got to school on Monday, I let my students know that directions are a part of every day life and if directions are given, it is best to read them before you start your given task. I guess that you are never too old, or too professional to read directions. After all--They are given for a reason.
I know this post doesn't have too much to do with school things, but I felt that if I am writing to reflect then this is a perfect example of something that I needed to reflect upon. I hope you all are having an amazing February and I look forward to seeing you back here soon. I have some great things that I am going to be posting within the next few days...so stay tuned.
Have a blessed day and don't forget to leave me a comment to let me know what you think of my blog! If you really like the blog...become a follower!!!
