Down to the basement ... and down to the planks

The bedroom a bit of a cavern, and the dining and living rooms a bit of the Old Curiosity Shop, on Sunday night we moved downstairs to our shagadelic 1970s basement rec room. It's quite cosy, actually, though we had a bit of a bad trip anticipating the move ... in the spring of '06 we lived down there for two weeks while the bathroom was renovated. (There is no second bathroom -- we lived down there with a camp toilet and a laundry tub.)

This time was much more comfortable, though the cats weren't impressed. Daisy is taking it in her stride here -- check out the glowing eyes on the foot stool in the middle right. Harry, on the other hand ... Harry is the glowing object squished between the air duct and the wardrobe on the left.


He often crawls up here in a pique and then wonders why.


And then needs a little help disengaging.


Monday morning we drove to Home Depot where we filled our little Honda Fit rental with a floor sanding kit that must have weighed as much as the car. I love Home Depot. I know, that's almost as bad as loving McDonald's or WalMart ... but I can't help it. Basically, it's staffed by a million clones of my brother Brian, and what's not to love about that?

Back home, it was all work. Kelly, in full dust control mode (come to think of it, when isn't she in dust control mode?) tapes off the study and bedroom.


Here I am in the bedroom with the largest piece of that floor sanding kit. Given that the floors are so old and looked as if they had already been redone once, we did not go for the drum sander ... you know, that machine that if you touch it down in a moment of absent-mindedness takes a short cut to China through your oak planks.


We did, however, take the edger, a tool of great and mysterious power. Here's Kelly using it in the study. Seconds after this picture was taken, Kelly put the edger to work and was promptly pulled across the floor for the second time. (The first time resulted in that awful gouging you can see in the floor.)

Kelly is tiny but has considerable upper body strength. No matter. I, on the other hand, am large with less upper body strength. That made no difference either; I too was pulled across the floor.

We returned the edger (getting a full refund; see the above comment about loving Home Depot) and Kelly picked up our little palm sander and went to it, smoothing out all those gouges and finishing the edges of both rooms beautifully:

So what if she has carpal tunnel syndrome??

Next: it is finished!