"Everything" is relative, of course. We have no dining chairs, and no club chairs in the living room. My husband's office is sans desk, right now, and also desk chair, lamps, bookshelves and filing cabinets. Some of these deficiencies will be rectified when my husband gets his bonus in April - "when you get your bonus" has taken on an almost mystical quality, at this point - but others will wait a while longer.
My husband and I decided to go ahead and have the floors refinished before "bonus day", because having the fake fireplace removed left a gaping hole in the floor. And the idea of moving furniture in, and then having to move it back out to have the floors redone later, did not appeal to either of us.
We got in touch with a local flooring contractor, and decided he was our guy (partly because nobody else would call us back, following Hurricane Harvey and the construction boom it caused, and partly because we chatted about what an amazing biographer Ron Chernow is while he measured the house). Initially, we were supposed to have our floors refinished two weeks before Christmas.
But...
Given all the work from Harvey, the flooring contractor had to bump our date back, and he was going to start 4 days before Christmas.
Four days.
Four days when we would have to have the dogs boarded somewhere, and we would have to stay in a hotel, all while dealing with the holidays. And there were no vacancies at our preferred boarding places. And no hotels that would accept two humans and two dogs during that time. Four days before Christmas was obviously a "no-go", especially since we were celebrating in Houston with family from out of town.
Our flooring contractor was elated when I asked if we could postpone things until after New Year's Day.
The only problem was that we found out our start date was being pushed back after we'd dragged my brother-in-law over to the house to move all the furniture outside.
We did the best we could with the mattress from our guest room on the living room floor, serving as a sofa, for almost a month. I'm sure our neighbors think we're strange, or were convinced we'd rented the place out to college students, given the sudden downgrade in seating.
Did I mention our 44" wide dining table had been placed in our kitchen, where the space between the countertops is 54" wide? And that the dining table is almost as long as the kitchen? No?
I should have mentioned that.
We are now some of DoorDash's favorite customers, and now that things are relatively back to normal (and our dining table is out of the kitchen) I daily expect our delivery guy to drop by to make sure we haven't died.
Prior to the refinish, our floors were a lovely shade of 1980s golden-oak (a.k.a. orange), with some areas that had experienced spills which removed all the finish from the surface, exposing the bare wood beneath.
I was not too fond of them.
We had our floors refinished to a beautiful strawberry-blonde color, since the floors are red oak, interspersed with white oak.
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| The "media center" is temporary, a holdover from my first apartment 15 years ago. The front drawers are goldenrod fiberglass flecked with gold threads, which unfortunately don't show up well in this picture! |
I love love love the color (half Dura-Seal "neutral" and half Dura-Seal "Cottage White", if you're wondering). My husband loves the color (and loves that I'm happy with the color).
There's just one problem.
There is a streak in the floor, about 8 feet long and 1/8" wide, as if someone's shoelace dragged through the finish before it had completely cured. It's visible from the dining room, though almost invisible when you're standing in the living room. It isn't in a location where we intend to put a rug, because it's right down the middle of the path of travel between the staircase and the dining room.
We initially thought we could live with it, mostly because we're just tired of "camping out" in our house.
But we ultimately decided to have it fixed. Which means the dogs will have to be boarded (again), right after returning from Dallas, where they stayed with my endlessly patient mother. They'll get to have an afternoon at the house today (Thursday, January 18) before they go to our boarding-place of choice, tomorrow (Friday, January 19).
I feel like the worst "dog mom" ever.
But our dogs will come home (Monday) to beautiful floors, and an unobstructed view out the front windows, at least until 8 weeks after "Bonus Day."
They are also coming home to a house without water, because our exterior water main burst, at some point in the past 72 hours, and our pest control guy alerted me to it around noon. I have purchased bottled water for "plumbing" purposes, and my mother will have to stay at my sister's house for tonight, at least (though I'm sure she won't mind seeing her non-dog grandchildren).
Also, after the days of freezing weather we've had, I returned home from buying the bottled water to find that we'd won the emergency trash pickup lottery, but hadn't put our trash out. I sprinted down the driveway with an overflowing trash can, and decided afterwards that a medicinal glass of muscato was in order.
I mean, there's no water to the house, right? Got to stay hydrated somehow.
