Friday, June 8, 2007

I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink... no, no, no.

I'm sooooooooooo tired, I don't know what to do. What I know I'm not doing is any more work on this blasted floor today. I'm taking at LEAST a 12 hour break, minimum. Like, from 10:30pm until 10:30am, minimum. GAH!

So, where I am. Oy, Yoda am I? Yes, so tired. Where am I on this "get the linoleum adhesive off the dining room floor" project:

Around 1/3 of the room has all the staples removed, all the basic scraping done, which means I've scraped up the black stuff that will come up relatively easily (though still hellishly tediously) without a seemingly endless cycle of soak/scrape/soak/scrape, and it's been mopped.

Ah, but "mopped," that sounds like such an easy task, no? NO. This is The Mopping Of The Brown Gunk. See, under the black hard stuff is the Brown Gunk. You might THINK that you've made decent progress by scraping up the black stuff, but the Brown Gunk, it fool you bad. Yes, it "mops up" but this is not an exaggeration: For every 6 sq ft or so of floor which averages 1/2 black stuff (easy to mop) and 1/2 brown gunk (hell to mop), it took 3-4 buckets of mopping, emptying the water only when it was beyond sludge, then taking a minimum of 5 minutes of rinsing the mop between each bucket so that it could be deemed "clean enough" to continue mopping.

The middle 1/3 of the room has the staples removed, or at least the ones that my knee, momentarily holding all my weight, hasn't found yet. In that section I have completed about 3/5 of the rough scraping. So what is "rough scraping" as opposed to "basic scraping"? Rough scraping consists of using my half-moon garden edger to scrape up the really REALLY loose stuff. To reach "basic scraping" level requires sitting on my butt with a razor scraper, scraping up the "able to be scraped up without soaking" stuff. I'm leaving all the must-be-soaked stuff for last because I learned from the one tiny section I did that is totally cleaned that the easily scraped off stuff really just gunks up things as you're trying to scraped off the must-be-soaked stuff.

Am I making any sense? Didn't think so.

Tomorrow's goal is to finish the room to the staples out/rough scraped/basic scraped/mopping from hell level. Sunday's goal is to take out the last bit of plywood which requires me to figure out a way to cut it in a straight line right across the dog's hallway where we're putting vinyl flooring for now, do the staples/scrape/mop routine on that, then do as much of the final soak/scrape removal of the black stuff as I can handle, physically and mentally.

Thank Maude that we have air conditioning. As I'm doing this work, I have zero ecological consciousness: It was 100 degree heat factor outside today and I had our new AC cranked down to 72, which is normally unheard of for me (I normally freak if someone wants to put it below 78 unless the humidity is just too high).

Maybe I will get up and fix myself a drink.

You say I'm putting you on
But it's no joke
It's doing me harm, you know I can't sleep
I can't stop my brain, you know it's three [days]
I'm going insane
You know I'd give you everything I've got
for a little peace of mind
[or the money for a professional floor refinisher]
:::insert a string of incoherent mumbling that if you play backwards says "Leslie, you're screwing up your wrists and shoulders, plus you're whining and whining sucks":::

6 comments:

YardbirdSax said...

Oh yeah, don't you love it when old houses throw curveballs at you? It's almost like they punish you for thinking you were going to get off easy. I've decided that from here on out, I'll always assume a job is going to be hard as hell. That way, maybe it won't turn out so bad! Or at least when it does, we'll be prepared. :)

Rechelle said...

We refinished an old floor that had carpet on it a few years ago. Or kids were 7,4, and 3 and we gave them a nickel for every staple they pulled out. Kept them out of our hair for a while, and we got help getting all those staples out.

Rechelle said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Leslie said...

Yardbirdsax, yeah we tried to presume that it would be a hellish project, but still it took us aback!

And Rechelle, my 11yo granddaughter would love to make some money that way, but these staples are in there so hard that it usually takes me putting my full weight into it just to get one popped up. UGH!

Dara said...

Tiler's kneepads... the good ones (NOT those cheapo gardener's kneepads) are the only things that saved me in doing floor work. Reading your description brough back soooo many memories of the entry hall. Such a small space, but soooo many hellish layers and adhesives it was not to be believed.

Anonymous said...

The other option is to find your old wood floors thrown underneath the crawl space.... where you dig them out and find lots of dry rot. I think both elbow and knee pads would be a good idea for some of these projects in the crawl space. Thanks for the suggestion