Whew!

After 5 days of hard work (interspersed with long and frequent bouts of laziness), I finally finished the floor in Nick's room. I don't have the camera in the house at the moment, or I'd post a few pics so you too could bask in the glory of a project finished. My only regret is that I'm always so gung-ho to get going on a project like this that I usually forget to take "before" and "during" pictures so you can really see the change. But trust me, the painted concrete is much, much nicer than the 30-year-old maroon shag carpet that was in there, plus there's the peace of mind that comes with having vacuumed up a thick layer of fine black dirt that was trapped underneath the old mohair padding (yes, this was pre-synthetic stuff here) .

See, the nice thing about painting floors is that you do work hard--pulling up carpet and tack strip, scraping glue, cutting the heads off nails with the angle grinder, making showers of neat sparks in the process, even donning heavy gloves and a dust mask and eye protection--but then you get to take a long break. Sometimes even a 24-hour break. But during the entire time you spend playing the Sims on the computer waiting for the paint to dry--and this is absolutely the best part--you still get to tell yourself that you're painting. No kidding. If somebody calls on the phone, and it's three in the afternoon and you're in pj's because you got up at nine, put a coat of primer on, went back to bed for a few hours, got up, made a grilled cheese, took a look in at the semi-dry paint, then settled in to your video game, when they ask, "What are you doing?" you can still say, without a trace of irony, "Painting." In that way, it's a lot like spending the whole afternoon "doing laundry."

It's also nice, as I sit staring my last ten days of freedom in the face, to have achieved something tangible. I spent so few days in a row at home this summer that I never really settled into any sort of productive routine. I had intended to get some wall painting done, as well as pull up more carpet, and it wasn't until Nick went back to Texas that I realized if any of that was going to get done this summer, I had better get on it. Really, I'm one of those kinds of people that only gets anything accomplished under pressure. Actually, I'm already in the middle of ripping up the rest of the carpet in the hallway and the dining room so we can install laminate flooring in the rest of the house when Tyson gets back and we get paid again. I'm looking forward to that because when I painted the house four years ago, I assumed we'd be replacing the flooring sometime soon so there's all sorts of paint blobs everywhere. It'll be nice to have everything in a state of presentability, so we don't feel like we have to apologize or explain things when we give people a tour of the house.

Anyway, thanks for reading and as soon as I can (Thursday?) I will post the pictures for the two of you that are probably interested (Mom and Kathy). Incidentally, Thursday is my birthday and I could really use a table saw (cheap) or one of those fancy retracting dual-angle mitre saws (expensive) for my floors (hint, hint, Tyson).