Our floors are finished. 480 square feet in 16 days (which really worked out to seven flooring days including New Years). They are more beautiful than I had imagined.
When we moved in the floors in the two bedrooms were plank wood. Which sounds nice except all the planks were different sizes, spaced differently and had been painted many times. They were impossible to keep clean (since everything you swept and the mop water just got stuck between the boards) and a new colour was revealed every time something was dragged across them. The previous owners hadn't even bothered to move their bed or dresser for the most recent painting hence the two shades of brown and our very strategically place rugs. Oh and the nails that refused to stay nailed in which was death to our socks.
I told R a few months ago that we should redo them and he talked me out of it since we don't plan to stay in this house for too long but keep it to rent it out to tenants (we already rent out an apartment on the first floor). Given that we wouldn't be staying in it and wouldn't be selling it we'd never really recoup the cost of new flooring. I was convinced (but mostly by the promise that when we had our real house I could line the floors with as much refurbished barn wood as I wanted).
Mmm ...
Then I headed home for Christmas and R rescinded. I think my initial "but how is Frankie Moon supposed to crawl across the floors without getting all cut up on poky rusty nails" had an effect.
Nine trips to Home Depot later and with the entire contents of the upstairs piled precariously around the living room we became flooring masters. We'll not so much we. More like R and his very handy and sweet dad and brother. I wasn't to lift too much or hammer too hard or breath in anything noxious. I was half happy to oblige, as I finished up knitting projects in the dust-free downstairs, and half felt like a big old pile of lazy. But I'm a Gemini so this makes fine sense.
They are done and so beautiful and I am so proud of R. His love of tools and handimaness has grown exponentially since we bought this house (like from zero to a thousand). And he is good at it all - a perfectionist just like his dad (which he would NEVER admit). Is there anything more attractive than a someone who can make things with his hands? Really now.
Next - the painting of the nursery. I've picked the colour after much Home Depot anguish and doubt, but am still really nervous. I don't feel like I have a finished idea at all of what this room should look like.
I know it should be filled with all the people who already love little Frankie Moon so I've gathered pictures of the soon-to-be aunts and uncles and gramas and grampas and can't wait to tell of the stories and smiles captured in each shot. I don't feel like I ever really knew anything about my grandparents. They were around but it was like everyone just assumed I wouldn't find their lives very interesting.
And nature - so important - birdies and trees and cliffs and ocean. And maybe a huge world map. I'd like an old one, an antique one, but fear it might set Frankie back a few years in school - what do you mean there's no USSR? So maybe just an old looking new one. I want it to be filled with all of the beautiful things in the world - all those things that I have always imagined showing to tiny eyes - bugs and animals and distant places and love, love, love.
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