The Whited Sepulchre

The second-most frequently asked question is, "How is the house coming along?"

Sure, it looks great from the outside, but inside...

Right now we're struggling to get all that black icky stuff you see in the photo scraped off the dining room floor. It's a nice old maple floor, but to find it, first we pulled off the ugly grey indoor-outdoor carpet, then a layer of linoleum squares, then a layer of sheet linoleum, and finally here is this black stuff. Barry thinks it may be tar paper. Anyway, it glued itself pretty thoroughly to the floor, and the only real way to get it off is by scraping, scraping and scraping.

It's the new punishment/threat in the house. Kids having a fight? "If you kids don't settle this you're ALL GOING TO SCRAPE THE FLOOR!" Kids want to stay up past bedtime? "Sure, if you're staying up to SCRAPE THE FLOOR!"

Actually it's resulted in some rather nice "family moments," when we all sprawl on the floor with our scrapers, hacking away at gunk, and share our innermost thoughts (the most often voiced one being, "I sure wish this floor was done"). And we really are making progress. We only have a few square feet to go.

Then we get to rent the floor sander, sand the floor, and somehow get a finish on it without a) walking on it ourselves or b) having the cat walk through and get stuck in it.