Digital Analogue

Change of plans

I totally just spent six hours working on my kitchen floor.

Earlier this week, I came to the sad conclusion that there was just no saving my kitchen floor—although theoretically possible, it'd just be too hard. See, after Kathy and I got the top layers off, we discovered three things: 1) the kitchen used to be three rooms, and where the walls were the hardwood floor isn't, 2) a lot of nails broke when we tried to pull them, and just wouldn't come out with pliers, so we had to hammer them in (rendering later sanding impossible), and 3) the bottom layer of grey paper was solidly glued to the floor in most of the room.

So I talked to the guy at Breslin's to come out and measure my kitchen floor for linoleum; we scheduled a time for 11am today. Last night, I wanted to tidy up the kitchen and get the last of the quarter-round out before he came.

I'm not sure what made me do it, but I scraped a bit at the spot I'd spread stripper over. I'd tried that earlier in the week, but when it didn't dissolve the paper and glue, I abandoned it. But tonight I discovered that after it dried the paper had become brittle and really easy to scrape. And, afaict the resulting layer requires no sanding.

This caused me to reëvaluate my plans.* Because now, I have a very real possibility that I could get the part of the floor that's not the former walls (conveniently near the cabinetry) restored as a hardwood floor. So I had to check on that, verify that the stripper was doing what I thought it was, and make sure that the grey paper and glue was uniform over that part of the floor. After six hours (!) of working on the floor, I'm fairly convinced that I can get a good-looking hardwood floor out of the part of the room past the cabinets, and near the cabinets where the floor is clearly bad, I can do the linoleum. (Credit to Kathy for the original idea.) I may have the guy do both measurements just in case, although he's probably going to have to order the materials on Monday, so the extra set of measurements wouldn't do much good.

Anyway, now I need to take a nap until he gets here. I am gonna be so sore tomorrow. Today.

*Yes, yes, I knöw.

"For all I know, someone put it together as a joke and sent copies around. It almost doesn't matter: the example is so perfect that mere existence could not possibly add anything to it." --Vicki Rosenzweig