How I Spent My Summer Vacation by Stacy Conradt

...Or my Fourth of July long weekend, anyway. Boating? No. BBQing? Nay. Setting off fireworks? Not even. This is how I have spent the last three days:

First there was this:

Then there was this. Please note the two bottles of wine on the counter and the small, curious dog in the doorway.

If you look in the background on the landing in the next one, you can see the piss-yellow linoleum that used to cover the kitchen floor as well. Literally piss-colored. If one of the dogs peed on the floor, you wouldn't know until you stepped in it because it blended right in. Underneath the nasty linoleum was another layer of linoleum that was supposed to look like faux marble, but it wasn't fooling anyone. Underneath that was a layer of subfloor, and underneath that was a layer of black glue/tarpaper-y stuff which we have spent the past week scraping up off of the floor. My fingers are still sore from being bent in the scraping position for like eight hours at a time, so please forgive any typos.

This one was taken from the other direction - looking into the breakfast nook from the dining room. That thing that sort of looks like a stationary bicycle is actually a giant floor sander.

The floor of the breakfast nook, sanded (mostly) and pretty!! Oooh. Suddenly the back-breaking hours spent hunched over the floor breathing into a hot dust mask seem worth it. Seriously, I am now intimate with every square inch of my kitchen floor now, and not for fun reasons.

My quarantined husband. It looks like Outbreak or something, doesn't it? And I would like you to know that I didn't just leave him in there to do the kitchen himself. I promise I was in there sanding and scraping and sweeping and injuring myself too.

That big gob of tape you see at thet bottom is my pathetic patch-job... one of our dogs (the small, curious one) could no longer stand that we were doing something in the kitchen without him and barreled right through the plastic.

I tried to convince him that laying on the couch and napping was seriously a lot more fun than what we were doing in the kitchen, but he wouldn't believe me until he saw it for himself. [shakes head] Kids.

"But Stacy," you're saying. "If that's your kitchen, where is your refrigerator? Where are all of your utensils, where's your toaster, your cookie jars, the booze you keep on top of the fridge, the glass jars of flour and cocoa and sugar?" Oh, I have an answer for you:

Obviously, it's all in the dining room. I'm not going to lie, sitting at the table and reaching over about 12 inches to grab something out of the fridge is sort of convenient. But, I think you'll agree, slightly out of place. It still needs two coats of polyurethane but here it is: stained and pretty floor!

Stained and pretty husband!

The best part is, as far as house-remodel stuff goes, this was dirt cheap. It was $100 to rent the floor sander for the day, including the sandpaper and accessories. And we probably spent $40-$50 on sandpaper for the small sanders we already have so I could get in the little side spots along the wall that the big floor sander couldn't get. We bought stain and polyurethane for like $35, but we're taking that back today because we found some leftover from when we did the bathroom and it was more than enough to cover the kitchen. So, for $150 and a LOT of time and effort - new kitchen floor!! :D