Living Large in the Kitchen
Our house in unreasonably large, yet our kitchen is about the size of what you’d expect to see in a Manhattan apartment. Tonight, the kitchen is my home.
With the drywall work done, the next step was to get the floors fixed up. So today and yesterday “Vincent” and his boys worked on my floors. What a night-and-day difference compared to the drywall experience. Vincent showed up when he said he would, sealed off the work areas with plastic and tape, and after he left, there was no indication that he was ever there (except, of course, the floors looked better!).
In addition to working on various spots on the 2nd and 3rd floor, they put a new coat of varnish on the first floor this morning, so I can’t walk on the floors tonight. In anticipation of this, I put a mattress on the kitchen’s tile floor. I’m sitting on it right now, with my laptop (the kitchen was the first room we fixed up, and I put a cat5 network connection in it - this is the first time I’ve used it!). I also have the sink in the kitchen, and I can get to the toilet in the basement, so I’m living large. The only thing I didn’t plan for is the fumes from the varnish. So I’ve taped up some plastic between the kitchen and the dining room. So far it’s proving good enough to prevent a headache, but there’s still a strong odor, even with the windows open.
The floors will be ready for foot traffic just in time for Kai and Maria’s return tomorrow afternoon. With the floors and walls done (except for painting) we can finally go back to living normally in our house. Like the story It Could Always Be Worse (scroll to the bottom of the linked page for a synopsis), just getting things back to where they were 6 weeks ago - before the drywall rubble bomb went off - will seem like a huge improvement.
