Those floors are finally finished

We spent the weekend as busy bees doing a lot of cleaning out and packing for our trip to Mexico of course but mainly we spent time finishing our wood floors in the living room. After all we still have to finish a lot of projects before leaving. So the new walnut floors had to be sanded and then protected and then varnished.


It's been a long trek to getting these floors. When we first moved in to the house we tore up the linoleum to reveal the original wood floors. They were a horrible mess, - gray and grungy. The planks varied in size and had woodworm in almost every board, charming but not salvageable. After a year and a half Seb poured rough concrete over them and we lived with that for a few months (ouch!) until I insisted on some carpet because after all we had a baby coming. The baby came and celebrated his first birthday and still no progress on the floors. Then one February when Little S was about 18 months (and oh sooooo cute I might add) we had our fireplace installed. The workmen destroyed the cheap carpet in the living room and so we took most of it up and relied on moving blankets and throw rugs to cover the floor. Talk about hideous! I got tired of explaining to everyone that this room would one day be finished. After a while I just warned friends "oh yeah be careful with the baby because that's a concrete floor." Finally we threw away the rest of the carpet and Seb worked hard to lay slats for the new wood floors. He left the slats for months and I kept tripping over them. Little S actually learned to walk over them doing wobbly, see-saw jumps in between the concrete. Seb had started his new job in Lyon though and he wasn't around much so he never had time to finish anything let alone that low priority project. I went ahead and unscrewed his slats. They were driving me nuts.



During the summer of 2006 we took out our loan and hired our contractor. But when we laid out everything in the work contract we decided that paying him for doing anything downstairs was excessive. After all the downstairs was almost done (you'd have to have seen the upstairs to truly understand this...) and we could finish it ourselves.

Then one day four months ago, and three and a half years after the concrete first got poured, we laid new slats and poured some extra concrete to balance out the floor once again. We just needed to let it dry for two weeks and bring our new boards inside to dry out, and in a few short weeks weeks we'd have our living room floors! It took four months, another stint of cheap carpet and throw rugs and a sympathetic father-in-law to get there but we finally got the floors installed in May. Then of course to protect them until we could varnish them we put the ugly carpet back for a short while.


Finally the project is done and somehow all those years of waiting are forgotten. A very content calico lies basking, admiring. We feel exhilerated. We chose the wood, the colors, the varnish. We did all the work ourselves. There's something incredibly rewarding in all that sacrifice.