Because by the time we clean up all our tools and find something to eat and inflate our air mattress, I’m too tired!

But I want to take a second to show these off:

There are hardwood floors under the horrid linoleum floors in the kitchen, too! So we’re tearing out the peel’n’stick tile plus plywood flooring on top. The plywood, thankfully, is only nailed down. So it’s a matter of brute force, not weird chemicals. Recommended tools: a handheld oscillating tool with saw blade to score sections of the bad flooring; a pry bar and mallet to loosen edges and nails; a Stanley Fubar to pull out large sections; brute force, and yelling.

This section of the floors have the same varnish the front reading room had, which gave us just as much trouble to remove as the carpet adhesive. So we’re just going to sand the roughest sections with handheld random orbital sanders and paint them. We’re going to paint them dark brown, with the idea that we’ll eventually strip and oil these, too, and dark brown paint in the grooves will be easier to deal with than any other color. Hopefully that will look decent and somewhat in keeping with the original character of the house. And there won’t be a learning curve as there would have been had we installed another kind of laminate or linoleum, as we’ve never laid our own flooring before.

And one more thing:

Here’s our cat Milo trying to make nice with my mom’s cat, Chloe. Milo is staying with my parents, while the tougher cat, Paisley, is staying with us here. As is Coriander, who really digs laying in the grass and taking walks along the bike path.