I love my laundry room! The above picture is one half of the floor to ceiling cupboards with shelves that I'm storing a lot of overflow kitchen stuff in. Thanks to my Dad who shaved down the boards to fit into the cabinets, I was able to unpack many boxes and still haven't even filled all of the shelves. This stuff may eventually migrate back to the pantry so it's closer to the kitchen, but the whole pantry thing isn't in the workplan until phase III or IV. In the meantime I'll gladly use this space. Additionally, the laundry room has a nice big east facing window, a bright overhead light, big sink, more storage around the sink and plenty of space that if I wanted to leave my ironing board out 24/7, I could do it without really disturbing anybody. By the way, this is an enormous leap of the small little closet of a laundry room we had at our last house.

The floor is done! Well, it was done Friday, but we've been trying to stay off of it so that the oil based coating has a fighting chance of curing to a nice hard finish. They look really nice. These images certainly don't do Dan the Floor Man's hardwork justice, so take my word for it, they look great. The top picture is the entryway, where the wood is laid on the diagonal. The wood there is alternating maple and red oak. The maple is just gorgeous, and who thought it wasn't necessarily a popular wood at the time. The other picture is the big room and the wood there is laid the straight conventional way and is a combination of white and red oak. It now has a nice satin finish on it and you can't even tell where the three missing boards were. We are really glad that we went ahead and had it done. Now we're looking forward to having the trim finished out in that room and eventually getting some furniture to go in there.

As we were trying to relax and watch a little TV tonight (ironically, PBS's This Old House) we were hearing odd thumping noises. Muting the TV also yielded plaintive meowing from upstairs... from the room that was just completely sheetrocked today. Further inspection revealed not one, but two of our three wündercats were sealed into a roofline crawlspace under the eaves. Cursing ensued, followed by my quick thinking husband seizing the contractor's keyhole saw and making quick work of fashioning an escape hatch for the imprisoned pair. Everyone was fine, if a little shaken up and hungry. Pal made a beeline for the light, Puck on the other hand was reluctant and needed a few moments alone before making her exit. Fozzie is currently trying to get over his momentary delusions of being an only cat. A large, very heavy bucket of spackle is currently blocking the re-entry route. I'm sure our contractor will get a big laugh out of this when he shows up tomorrow and I don't doubt that it will be a long time before he lets us live this one down.

In other news, the floor has received the first coat of sealant. It looks great, but the whole house reeks of fumes.

Just another day in the life of this old house and its weary inhabitants!

No pictures of the floor yet, mainly because we don't have any lights in that room and I don't want to get in there and mess up any of the work that Dan the Floor Man has done today. What can be seen is that he's repaired the big crater going across the room and sanded it almost all down. It looks rather amazing as is, you can barely tell where the repair was made. The new wood matches the old perfectly. Once it's done, I'm positive the casual observer will never know that there even was a repair. There are still some smaller nail holes to be filled and a little sanding left before he starts with the polyurethane or whatever sealer he'll be using.

As you can see, these are pictures of the wood floors. The floors shown here are in the parlor (or Grand Ballroom as referred to by some - this is a room that was recently joined back together after previously having been broken up into three smaller rooms) and the parlor, by the side entry door and the foyer, respectively. You'll note a distinct difference in the last (foyer) photo. Besides being laid on the diagonal and being comprised of alternating boards of maple and white oak, this section of wood floor was also covered by carpeting for numerous years - at least until yesterday, and I have the staple pulling blisters to prove it! Moving up to photos number one and two you can see how the floor that's been exposed looks. You'll also note that a portion of the floor was also at some point covered with glued on linoleum squares in front of the door. What isn't shown here is the numerous holes drilled in the floor for carrying wiring up from the basement or the 12 foot long, five inch wide crater where there are planks missing from the floor because a wall had been installed there.

We hadn't initially planned on having the floors refinished. But isn't that what this old house thing is all about - the unplanned work, the little surprises along the way? Well, it all just happened to come together. We were serendipitously able to quickly get on the schedule of the coveted local floor refinishing guy, we have very little furniture as it is, and currently nothing in this room that we really haven't figured out what to do with anyway and if we don't have the floors done in this room that we're having everything else done to, it will just be a shame and something I think we would regret. So in the end (which would be about a week from now according to Dan the Floor Man) all of the flooring should look much more similar to that in photo number three - oh with the exception that the rest of the flooring is not laid on the diagonal and it's all just white oak, no fancy alternating stuff. Stay tuned...