Joe The Floor Guy called Friday afternoon to say that he was coming by to look at the floors and give us some free advice. I immediately began to worry and fret, and that became contagious. By the time Joe got there an hour later, Charlie and I had convinced ourselves that we'd torn up the floors beyond repair, that we never should have started this stupid project, and that I'd be better off just covering it all up with carpet.
When Joe showed up he walked through all three rooms, took a look at the still-yucky floor in the other parlor, told us that there really isn't an easier way to get the glue up than to tediously scrape at it, and declared that we did a pretty good job.
Then the trouble started. Joe verified my opinion (and Mare's too) that these aren't the original floors. "You have wide pine under this stuff," he said. "What's on there now is red oak, but it's a cheap floor and not real thick. It'll last awhile, though. You know, you could take this stuff up and restore the original floors...."
I'd been thinking the same thing, remembering when Mare and I did just that on another old house he used to own.
Charlie read my thoughts. "Oh, no. Hell, no. If you're gonna do that, you're on your own. I didn't go through all this sanding for you to pull it up."
"It would be a big pain in the ass," Joe said, "because it's all hand-nailed and you'd have to fill in all those holes."
"Like I did when I took off the outside of the house," I said brightly. "I had to fill in billions of nail holes in the original clapboards."
"Oh, Lordy," said Charlie.
"Well yeah, compared to that this wouldn't be so bad. We've refinished floors like that before and they look really good when they're done," said Joe.
"Oh, Lordy," said Charlie.
Joe continued, "If you're gettin that idea, what you need to do is go downstairs and look up at the floor from underneath to see how much patching and stuff there is. It'd be a big job for you, but it'd bring back the original floors."
"I wonder if they raised the baseboard..." I mused, then looked at the wall closely. "Nope, looky here. You can see the seam between the plaster and the top of the baseboard. I bet only the shoe moulding was raised. That would mean I'd just have to pry that off, not the whole thing. Oh, gosh, Joey, now you've got me thinking...Mrs. Kelly would be happy if I put back the original floors."
"Then Mrs. Kelly better come back from the dead and help you do all that," Charlie said. I sense a mutiny.
Joe left laughing. "Let me know what you decide."
Free Agency
I knew it would happen sooner or later. Joe The Floor Guy got wind that Charlie and I are doing the floors ourselves. Joe hit me up on Facebook chat.
Joe: Hired a free agent, didya? You're on the list now...the bad list.
Me: I feel really bad about not hiring you, but honestly....I can't afford you.
Joe: Just kidding. Where are the finishing pics?
Me: We're a long way from finished. That's as far as we got on our days off.
Joe: DAYS?! I could've had it done in a day! Haha.
Me: That's cause you & your family are like the MLB of floor refinishing....we're more like the Little League team that's in last place....or the Bad News Bears.
Joe: Make sure you get all that old varnish off, or the new stuff won't bond right.
Me: Okay.
Joe: Do a light sand between coats.
Me: Okay.
Joe: And get in the corners good. Do you know how to get in the corners?
Me: Ummm....
Joe: I'll just come over Wednesday and evaluate your progress.
Me: No! I'm afraid you'll walk in and be all, OH MY GOD, you're doin it ALL WRONG!!
Joe: Duh. You know I'm gonna say that. But I can give you a little free advice.
Me: I am scared.
Joe: Hired a free agent, didya? You're on the list now...the bad list.
Me: I feel really bad about not hiring you, but honestly....I can't afford you.
Joe: Just kidding. Where are the finishing pics?
Me: We're a long way from finished. That's as far as we got on our days off.
Joe: DAYS?! I could've had it done in a day! Haha.
Me: That's cause you & your family are like the MLB of floor refinishing....we're more like the Little League team that's in last place....or the Bad News Bears.
Joe: Make sure you get all that old varnish off, or the new stuff won't bond right.
Me: Okay.
Joe: Do a light sand between coats.
Me: Okay.
Joe: And get in the corners good. Do you know how to get in the corners?
Me: Ummm....
Joe: I'll just come over Wednesday and evaluate your progress.
Me: No! I'm afraid you'll walk in and be all, OH MY GOD, you're doin it ALL WRONG!!
Joe: Duh. You know I'm gonna say that. But I can give you a little free advice.
Me: I am scared.
Before & During
I can't really call these before-and-after photos because we're still a long way from "after", so I'll say they're before-and-during pictures.
I couldn't get a before picture of the foyer because Charlie was half-done in there before I even knew he'd started, but here's what it looked like after he was finished sanding.
And saving the worst for last...the dining room. This is the room I was most worried about because it had so much damage to it. Several years before I bought the house, the neighbor's tree fell over in a storm and poked a big hole in the roof of my house. I'm not sure of the particulars, but the end result was a pretty large patch of water damage (about 4'x4') on the floor and the total replacement of the original plaster ceiling in there with sheetrock.
The floors are pine, narrow-width boards maybe an inch and a quarter. Oddly, the dining room floor's made from hundreds of short little pieces. (You can bigify the pictures and compare the foyer floor to the dining room floor to better see what I'm talking about.) In places we could see the original stain and varnish. The floors were stained sort of a maple color originally. I'm thinking of going a bit darker to even out some of the bad places in the floors that didn't completely sand out, like maybe an oak or walnut.
Last night I had a nightmare that while I slept, some creature came into the house and turned the floors black again. In the dream, it was sort of like a giant land-dwelling squid that poured out ink. I woke up terrified about 6 a.m. and ran into the dining room, then through the front parlor and into the foyer. The floors, of course, had not turned black. What a relief.
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| Front parlor before |
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| Front parlor sanded |
 |
| (Looks uneven because I hadn't run the ShopVac yet.) |
And saving the worst for last...the dining room. This is the room I was most worried about because it had so much damage to it. Several years before I bought the house, the neighbor's tree fell over in a storm and poked a big hole in the roof of my house. I'm not sure of the particulars, but the end result was a pretty large patch of water damage (about 4'x4') on the floor and the total replacement of the original plaster ceiling in there with sheetrock.
 |
| Ugly. |
 |
| Not so ugly. |
The floors are pine, narrow-width boards maybe an inch and a quarter. Oddly, the dining room floor's made from hundreds of short little pieces. (You can bigify the pictures and compare the foyer floor to the dining room floor to better see what I'm talking about.) In places we could see the original stain and varnish. The floors were stained sort of a maple color originally. I'm thinking of going a bit darker to even out some of the bad places in the floors that didn't completely sand out, like maybe an oak or walnut.
Last night I had a nightmare that while I slept, some creature came into the house and turned the floors black again. In the dream, it was sort of like a giant land-dwelling squid that poured out ink. I woke up terrified about 6 a.m. and ran into the dining room, then through the front parlor and into the foyer. The floors, of course, had not turned black. What a relief.
Woooo Hoooo!!!
With a post title like that, you know it can only mean one thing.
Yup, Charlie started on the front parlor floor today.
My mother called me this afternoon to ask how things were going. "I don't think he has any idea how long he's been workin," I told her. A few minutes later Charlie walked into the kitchen. "That clock on the stove's not right, is it?" I assured him it was. Four-thirty. He'd put in three solid hours of work. My mother and I laughed. Charlie looked grim. He may even have uttered a bad swear at that point.
But the floor looked like this:
Note that in the first photo, the curtains are up; in the second they're not. Yeah, probably should've taken those down before he started sanding....
When I saw the floor without that damnable black glue on it for the first time ever, I jumped up and down and clapped my hands. This time Charlie laughed. "I take it you like the way they look so far," he said. I answered a resounding, "YES!!"
He still has a long way to go. It's taking much longer to sand that black junk off than he thought it would. (His original plan for today was to sand the front parlor, the dining room, and the foyer.) As I write this, it's nearly 6 pm and he's still working. I've been trying off and on for the past half hour to get him to quit so I can buy him a nice steak dinner at the pub. He is most definitely not a grasshopper...
Yup, Charlie started on the front parlor floor today.
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| The historic first pass of the sander |
But the floor looked like this:
 |
| You can barely see the floor through all the dust.... |
When I saw the floor without that damnable black glue on it for the first time ever, I jumped up and down and clapped my hands. This time Charlie laughed. "I take it you like the way they look so far," he said. I answered a resounding, "YES!!"
He still has a long way to go. It's taking much longer to sand that black junk off than he thought it would. (His original plan for today was to sand the front parlor, the dining room, and the foyer.) As I write this, it's nearly 6 pm and he's still working. I've been trying off and on for the past half hour to get him to quit so I can buy him a nice steak dinner at the pub. He is most definitely not a grasshopper...
Less Grasshopper, More Ant
It's becoming quite clear to me that the universe is trying to tell me something.
And that something is: stop putting things off, girl.
The original plan for Wednesday was to come home, stay up, and pretty much kick butt on the house: get the second coat of paint on the parlor window, put the sash locks back on, clean house, do laundry, move some furniture and--most importantly--pack up the 5 billion fragile little things in my great-grandma's china cabinet so that Charlie and I can move furniture on Friday and start in on the floors.
Instead, I slept until 1:30 in the afternoon. (Totally Charlie's fault for not calling me on his lunch break like he usually does, right?) Then I straightened up the house a bit, colored my hair, and went to supper and movie night with my bestie Amy. "Meh," I thought, "I can do all that stuff on Thursday, no problem." Which would've been true, except...halfway through the first movie I got a page from work that I was being called in on mandatory overtime for day shift on Thursday. Day shift. Ugh. But as my friend Colleen tweeted, "Just think though, it's extra $$." True. OT pay which will go towards stain and poly and picture rail and other stuff. It's a good thing.
Thursday night I am cleaning my house. Then I'm pulling all the small furniture into the other parlor. Then I'm packing up the china cabinet. I am. Really. No more putting things off. I need to be less like the fabled grasshopper and more like the ant.
And that something is: stop putting things off, girl.
The original plan for Wednesday was to come home, stay up, and pretty much kick butt on the house: get the second coat of paint on the parlor window, put the sash locks back on, clean house, do laundry, move some furniture and--most importantly--pack up the 5 billion fragile little things in my great-grandma's china cabinet so that Charlie and I can move furniture on Friday and start in on the floors.
Instead, I slept until 1:30 in the afternoon. (Totally Charlie's fault for not calling me on his lunch break like he usually does, right?) Then I straightened up the house a bit, colored my hair, and went to supper and movie night with my bestie Amy. "Meh," I thought, "I can do all that stuff on Thursday, no problem." Which would've been true, except...halfway through the first movie I got a page from work that I was being called in on mandatory overtime for day shift on Thursday. Day shift. Ugh. But as my friend Colleen tweeted, "Just think though, it's extra $$." True. OT pay which will go towards stain and poly and picture rail and other stuff. It's a good thing.
Thursday night I am cleaning my house. Then I'm pulling all the small furniture into the other parlor. Then I'm packing up the china cabinet. I am. Really. No more putting things off. I need to be less like the fabled grasshopper and more like the ant.
The Dryer Works: A Tale of Procrastination
A few months ago I had to fill out a Pre-Evaluation Worksheet at my place of employment. Those things are awful. I fill one out, my boss fills one out, and we hope our answers meet somewhere in the middle. It's chock-full of uncomfortable questions. ("What can your chain of command do to assist you more effectively?" Right. I'm gonna criticize my superiors, in writing, in a document that stays in my personnel file for 5 years.) There's also a horrible fill-in-the-blank section. One of the sentences there is: "I am better than anyone else at ____________________." My first impulse was to fill in the blank with the word "procrastination". Honest, but probably not conducive to a raise. In support of the assertion that I am better (actually, worse) than anyone else at procrastination, I offer this:
My dryer stopped heating about 20 months ago. It stopped working altogether about 16 months ago. Today it was finally repaired. I did nothing whatsoever towards that end--it was Charlie who called the repairman on Friday.
Twenty months. Almost two years. It took the repairman less than an hour to fix the dryer. First he put an electrical thingy (a voltimeter?) on the dryer and determined it was getting only 110 current, not the 220 it needed to work. We ventured into the basement and discovered that half the breaker for the dryer was tripped. I felt sorta stupid for not noticing this myself, but the repairman said that the switch was only a wee bit away from the ON position, so it wasn't obvious. He reset the breaker and the dryer came on, but it still wouldn't heat. The thermal fuse was blown. He replaced that, turned on the dryer, and it worked beautifully. In celebration, I put my jammies in the dryer to heat 'em up and then ran and jumped into bed before they cooled off. (After the repairman left, of course.) It was quite lovely. Even though, since it was almost 50 degrees this morning, that wasn't really necessary.
The first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem.
"Hi, my name's Jaynie, and I am a procrastinator."
My dryer stopped heating about 20 months ago. It stopped working altogether about 16 months ago. Today it was finally repaired. I did nothing whatsoever towards that end--it was Charlie who called the repairman on Friday.
Twenty months. Almost two years. It took the repairman less than an hour to fix the dryer. First he put an electrical thingy (a voltimeter?) on the dryer and determined it was getting only 110 current, not the 220 it needed to work. We ventured into the basement and discovered that half the breaker for the dryer was tripped. I felt sorta stupid for not noticing this myself, but the repairman said that the switch was only a wee bit away from the ON position, so it wasn't obvious. He reset the breaker and the dryer came on, but it still wouldn't heat. The thermal fuse was blown. He replaced that, turned on the dryer, and it worked beautifully. In celebration, I put my jammies in the dryer to heat 'em up and then ran and jumped into bed before they cooled off. (After the repairman left, of course.) It was quite lovely. Even though, since it was almost 50 degrees this morning, that wasn't really necessary.
The first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem.
"Hi, my name's Jaynie, and I am a procrastinator."
Good Days, Indeed
It's been a good couple of days.
Charlie got in town from work early on Thursday and moved all the furniture out of the front parlor, fixed the low water pressure and the leak in the kitchen faucet, took up the rest of the tack strip in the front parlor, and put one coat of paint on the parlor window trim. I hung two more strips of wallpaper.
Then on Friday, he got back in town really early. By "really early" I mean that I was buried under the covers and a pillow fort when he called me and said, "What're you doin, sleepin?" I wiped the drool off my face and said, "Well, yeah. Doesn't everybody take a nap after they go to Lowe's at 7:30 in the morning to buy a ShopVac?" Charlie considered this a moment, "Ummm, not really. Let me in." I panicked. "You're here? Like, at my house, here?" My voice may have squeaked a tiny bit on that last part. This man cannot see me in my dorky Hello Kitty flannel jammies with bed-head and without concealer to cover the big zit on my forehead. I leaped out of bed, yanked on a pair of yoga pants, put my hair in a ponytail, tried to pull my bangs over the zit, tossed on the first shirt I laid hands on, and went to open the door. At that moment I realized the shirt I was wearing was the hoodie I borrowed from him a couple nights before. Hell's bells.
Charlie noticed. Of course he did. "Were you sleepin in my shirt?"
"No, of course not," I said. "I didn't wanna answer the door in my jammies and so--"
He looked at me critically. "What the hell happened to your head?"
I may have died a little on the inside then. But I think I made a good recovery. "So, uh, anyway, I bought a ShopVac."
"So you told me on the phone." He kicked the box. "And right here it is."
Now would be a good time for the basement trapdoor to finally fail, so I can just fall through it.
I cleared my throat. I tried to be business-like. "So. I'm sure you didn't come over here just to chat."
He grinned. "Maybe I did."
What an evil man.
And then he proved that he did not, in fact, come over just to chat because he patched the stovepipe hole in the front parlor, re-hung the piece of kitchen backsplash that fell off months ago, went to two rental places to find out how much a drum sander costs to rent, called one of his friends and asked him to come over Monday and fix my dryer (which hasn't heated in a year), and--saving the best for last--he took the sash locks off all five windows in the front parlor so that I could cook the paint off of them in the CrockPot. He was highly skeptical of that paint removal method until he himself fished a sash lock out of the hot water and the paint slid right off.
Charlie got in town from work early on Thursday and moved all the furniture out of the front parlor, fixed the low water pressure and the leak in the kitchen faucet, took up the rest of the tack strip in the front parlor, and put one coat of paint on the parlor window trim. I hung two more strips of wallpaper.
Then on Friday, he got back in town really early. By "really early" I mean that I was buried under the covers and a pillow fort when he called me and said, "What're you doin, sleepin?" I wiped the drool off my face and said, "Well, yeah. Doesn't everybody take a nap after they go to Lowe's at 7:30 in the morning to buy a ShopVac?" Charlie considered this a moment, "Ummm, not really. Let me in." I panicked. "You're here? Like, at my house, here?" My voice may have squeaked a tiny bit on that last part. This man cannot see me in my dorky Hello Kitty flannel jammies with bed-head and without concealer to cover the big zit on my forehead. I leaped out of bed, yanked on a pair of yoga pants, put my hair in a ponytail, tried to pull my bangs over the zit, tossed on the first shirt I laid hands on, and went to open the door. At that moment I realized the shirt I was wearing was the hoodie I borrowed from him a couple nights before. Hell's bells.
Charlie noticed. Of course he did. "Were you sleepin in my shirt?"
"No, of course not," I said. "I didn't wanna answer the door in my jammies and so--"
He looked at me critically. "What the hell happened to your head?"
I may have died a little on the inside then. But I think I made a good recovery. "So, uh, anyway, I bought a ShopVac."
"So you told me on the phone." He kicked the box. "And right here it is."
Now would be a good time for the basement trapdoor to finally fail, so I can just fall through it.
I cleared my throat. I tried to be business-like. "So. I'm sure you didn't come over here just to chat."
He grinned. "Maybe I did."
What an evil man.
And then he proved that he did not, in fact, come over just to chat because he patched the stovepipe hole in the front parlor, re-hung the piece of kitchen backsplash that fell off months ago, went to two rental places to find out how much a drum sander costs to rent, called one of his friends and asked him to come over Monday and fix my dryer (which hasn't heated in a year), and--saving the best for last--he took the sash locks off all five windows in the front parlor so that I could cook the paint off of them in the CrockPot. He was highly skeptical of that paint removal method until he himself fished a sash lock out of the hot water and the paint slid right off.
It was a good couple of days. A very good couple of days, indeed.
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