Saturday, June 30, 2007

What do you do when there's no hope?

I see it now: This dining room floor will never be "done." Never. It will be a never ending battle of forcing myself to do an hour here, 20 minutes there, to get the black shit scraped up, and then we'll use WHAT money to get it refinished?!?

I guess you could define me as despondent.

Then again I'm also a wee bit tipsy, and I'm together enough to know that if you're despondent and tipsy, then maybe you'd better wait until the tipsy part is over to see if the despondent part holds water.

Despondent while tipsy sure leads to a few classic "oh god, why ME?!?" and "life sucks" moments, doesn't it? It would be quite entertaining if I weren't in the middle of it all.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can relate.
I remember feeling utterly defeated when, after removing 4 layers of wall-to-wall carpeting, I arrived at NOT the oak floor I expected to find (based on other rooms) but a layer of linoleum firmly glued down to the oak. I tried to remove the loosest square and it came up in about a dozen pieces, leaving black tarry stuff on the floor. That was our front hall. Needless to say, it remained linoleum for some time before I could bring myself to go after it again with all manner of solvents and sharp implements of destruction.

Leslie said...

That black tarry stuff is exactly what I'm facing. I got a good kick-start on it, but now it's kicking my ass: there's just only so much time I can bring myself to putting into scraping, and scraping, and scraping, and scraping... Being hormonal and having had two large glasses of wine last night (about 1.5 too many!) certainly didn't help!!!

Anonymous said...

By any chance, would you have advice on patching an old floor? I did the same thing in removing layers (in my case, it was a Home Depot wood floor) from above the original heart pine. This is the original 1 by 3 tongue-and-groove circa 1912, not the new 1 by 3 dimensions. Lumberyards do not carry the same size to match my missing pieces. I'm looking for about 12, 12 foot lengths of the old size wood.

Leslie said...

bogfrog, I just responded to your question about the doors and my answer's going to be the same: I don't know the answer, but most definitely someone at http://www.oldhouseweb.com/newBB/ will!