I'm taking the day off tomorrow! Actually, I'm taking every Friday in January off. My boss was kind enough to let me use my 2006 vacation days in 2007, they're not supposed to carry over. I gotta plan better this year to use these days. After 6 years of having no kind of time off whatsoever, it's been difficult adjusting to the idea that I can pick days on which I will be paid for not showing up, and not doing anything. Of course, this would be easier for me to grasp if they really left me alone on my days off. Invariably however, someone calls me and asks me to do something. That's one of the reasons I didn't mind working through the end of last month, most everybody else was out and I certainly wasn't gonna bug anybody.

Anyway, tomorrow's itinerary is pretty full: I'm getting an electrician over to do some work, I'm renting a cargo van, hitting the hardware stores for supplies, stopping by an acquaintance's house to pick up some salvaged wood flooring, then replacing planks and cutting filler slats to prepare the floor for the Big Kahuna on Saturday: the drum sander.

We're refinishing the subfloors on the top floor of the house, sanding, staining and sealing. Like the kitchen floor, this is a not-forever type of thing, it's just to make the place more livable for now. I'm not totally sure how it will come out, but it's way cheaper than putting in real hardwood floors for the time being. Worse comes to worst, we can always invest in a mess of throw rugs to cover up what we do this weekend. I'm picturing an entire floor covered in strung-together bathmats. Hmmm, that might not be a bad look.

Yep, it's becoming quite clear, I have terrible taste.

Kitchen Floor Sealed
Originally uploaded by Jimmy Legs.

We've got our kitchen back, more or less. The varnish is supposed to cure for a long while before you can really treat it like a floor, but at least we're not all crowded into the living room. This project has been a good learning experience, I would have liked to done things differently, but eventually we'll redo the kitchen entirely on a, shall we say, more professional level.

Now that the lower floors are getting squared away, we can focus on getting some stuff done upstairs. This weekend we'll be refinishing the top floor. Looks like we'll paint the remaining floors for the time being, anything that's not an actual wood floor is covered with this atrocious linoleum tile. I've seen good uses of this stuff, but this looks like somebody dropped a hospital floor into the middle of a house. A disreputable hospital.

I got several power tools over the holidays, they're all piled up around the house, forcing me to run up and down many flights of stairs to complete even the simplest job. I need better organization; in short, I need some pegboard! God I should panel the house in pegboard. It's so very handy.

Bob Vila, eat your heart out

At the risk of sounding like a one-note blog, I'm getting frustrated with my kitchen floor. We set about painting it a few days ago (patch, prime, paint, poly) and I thought we'd be all done by now. However, I neglected to read the full set of instructions in which it states we have to wait up to 3 days for the paint to dry before laying down the protective polyurethane. Grrrr, I want my kitchen back! All the cabinet and stuff are in the living room. I'm using a door as a counter top. But now I gotta wait until at least tomorrow to get it over with. I don't mind the work of it, it's all this waiting around I can't stand. It's hard to shift gears and work on other projects when your brain is all set for something in particular. And for me, for now, it's turning my uneven, sloppily-patched plywood floor into a marvel of red paint and shiny coating stuff. Why, it'll look like a Pizza Hut! A glorious Pizza Hut!

Hmm, maybe we shoulda just left it "Primer Gray"

New Year's Eve found us sticking around the neighborhood, at the 11th hour we realized ToddP was having a show right down the street from us, so we went to that. Considering we've spent pretty much every New Year's at some kind of show, it would have been odd if we hadn't followed suit this time around. We haven't spent much time on the Wycoff side of the neighborhood so it was a good opportunity to get acquainted. It's a pretty fun area, or maybe it was just the exuberance of the season. The show was in a single-story commercial space, repurposed as a living space and performance room. Nice place, but whoa was it hot in there. If I ever open such a place, I'm gonna tack up coat hooks all over the place before I open my doors. Then again, that might lead to lawsuits after some kid slamdances into the wall and impales himself.

Ugh, now we gotta wait 36 hours.

When the makeshift bar ran out of booze, there was a conveniently-located Exxon Station down the street, which had not only beer, but Corn Nuts, a product that has always eluded me in the Big Apple. The climate became much more tolerable after the bands finished (The Fugue, Japanther, The Black Lips), as most of the people skipped out. Did everyone go home or was there some other place everybody to be? We walked home, which probably took a long time but I wasn't really paying attention. It was nice to be able to walk home from a ToddP show, hope there will be more down on our end of the neighborhood.

So with the holidays over, it's time to resume the drudgery of home improvement. Next up, how to secure the 3rd floor so Mr Bones can't get down into our part of the house and eat our cats' food. He's one evil feline.