Matt peeled back the carpet in the living room to reveal this--functional, attractive hardwoods. (That stuff running down the right is ancient linoleum. Why just on the one wall? Answer comes there none.)That's the good news.
The bad news is that he kept peeling:
Not all of the floor is in pristine shape, to put it mildly. There are several boards that are rotten, and some have been replaced with elegant and stylish plywood. So we'll definitely have to get a flooring person out to help us replace the funky boards. I think the project may be complicated by the fact that in both the rooms we've looked at, the boards run the entire length of the room. In other words, if the room is 15 feet long, each floorboard is also 15 feet long. I wonder how hard (read "expensive") it will be to find boards of the right wood and thickness that are 15 feet in length....And then there's the dining room:
AAAIIIGH!!!
Archeologically, it's quite interesting. At the bottom right, you can see the outline of a wrench that was lying on the floor when some painters came in and did their stuff. You can see the where their buckets were, and Matt thinks he has identified the ring from a beer bottle.
It's a little like Pompeii--the afterimage of an afternoon, captured for eternity. Or at least until we get our paws on it.
I don't know that it will really be any harder to sand a floor that has paint spatters on it than to sand one that is varnished, but it sure makes the amount of work involved really obvious. Which was not information I needed as WE STILL AREN'T DONE WITH THE PAINTING.
Yeah, I got a bit antsy, I guess. Plus, I like doing something that yields definite, obvious results. I'm simple that way. The only carpet left in the house is the guest bedroom upstairs. The wood floor in the hallway is exposed now, as is half of the study. The hall floor was painted battleship grey, but it's in good shape. The study floor is okay, so far, but there is a chunk missing, having been replaced with plywood.
ReplyDeleteI met one of the neighbors today: Jim Somethingorother. He's an older guy (we talked for a good 20 minutes about his experiences in WWII) and he was awfully proud of knowing just where all the neighbors work, where they're from, and the fact that he was responsible for the two useless stop signs on Ave F and the 20 mph speed limit. Go Jim. Said he actually wanted speed humps instead of stop signs. What a rebel. After he asked my name, his first question was what denomination Mel and I were. I told him I grew up Baptist(true) but I was interested in the Free Evangelical Church just down 95(not true). It only slowed him up a little bit. He assured me that in addition to the several Baptist churches and the big Lutheran church, there were a few "colored" churches. C'mon, at least he didn't mention "those people."
Welcome to small town, Texas.
Matt V.