One More Day

One more day and we'll be able to walk on our floor freely.  The floor should be done tonight and we'll be able to put furniture back next week.  It's crazy how much one can feel out of sorts when things like this are going on.  I am a creature of habit and I enjoy a quiet house of order.  You can't always tell that because I'm not much of a house keeper, but I do try to keep our living areas clean.  When all the stuff gets crammed into a few rooms and we can't keep our usual routines, it gets old.  I don't mean to sound ungrateful...I am so grateful and I feel so blessed to have such a beautiful home to live in.  I'm just saying that it will be nice when this is all over and I can go back to my usual routine.

Having this floor sanded and sealed has reminded me of when Mike and I had the floor put in almost 16 years ago.  We didn't have kids and we were both working.  I was delivering packages for Staples and he was at School Specialty.  I remember tearing out the old floor and then sitting for days on little stools pulling up staples and scraping up glue from the previous flooring.  I remember the nice guys (Pete and Fernando) who laid the new wood flooring.  I remember their names because they wrote it on the wood in one of the vents and on the underside of the countertop.  :) 
They were super nice kids and every day, we'd come home and see the progress and were amazed at how beautiful the floor was turning out.  Mike used to be a wood shop teacher and he loves all different kinds of wood, but we narrowed it down to hickory.  We imagined kids in our home some day and thought hickory would be good because it's beautiful, but it's also a harder wood than some of the other ones we could have picked.  I remember telling the guy I wanted varying sizes of planks (4, 5, and 6 inches) because I had them in varied sizes in the home I grew up in.  It wasn't a usual thing for the day, but I'm so glad I pushed for it because it has been unique. 
It was a pretty big investment for us.  We were both working, so we could afford it, but it was still a whole lot of money.  I remember thinking that we were spending more than a third of what we sold our entire home for that year.  (We lived in a trailer house West of town when we were first married.  We rented it for a few years until we finally sold it).
I remember going to a movie on the day of the final coat that was going on the floor.  We climbed in through a basement window and crept up the stairs to get our first look at the beautiful floor.  It was amazing.  We slept downstairs, in one of our many guess rooms, inhaling the fumes all night.
It was hardly an inconvenience for us at all.
This time around is a bit different.  16 years later, 4 kids and a dog to work around...it's been different for sure.  It's all so good though.
I took the kids skiing on the day of the first sanding.  The man got down past the yellowed finish and revealed that beautiful perfect wood underneath and Mike texted me with his excitement at how beautiful it was.  We got so used to how it looked with 16 years of wear and tear that we forgot that it was so light and beautiful underneath.
I remember the first dent I put in the floor.  It was after Jake was born and someone brought me a casserole.  It was full of gross looking things and Mike told me just to toss it because we were never going to eat it.  I pulled it out of the fridge (as I was carrying a pan of jell-o in another hand) and I dropped the heavy glass casserole dish on the floor.  It made a small fingernail sized dent in the floor and I said a whole lot of swears.  That was before I reformed my ways and tried to quit saying all the swears.  Lest you think I was a terrible potty mouth, it was only the good swears, and I really only said them when I dropped things.
Anyway, I cussed as I cleaned up the gross casserole and then I cussed when I saw the little dent underneath. 
I quit counting all the scratches and dents and I quit worrying about the wheels of the cars and trucks on the floor as Jake grew older and loved to roll monster trucks on the smooth surface.  We lived on that floor and we'll do it again.  I'll remember the first dent and I hope it's me so that I can be mad at myself and not one of the kids.  :)
This turned into a long post, but I'm trying to keep my resolution to blog more and this was on my mind. 
I feel so lucky to have such a beautiful home and I love my floor.  Life is good, even if it's a bit dusty and cluttery at the moment.