You Might Ask Yourself . . .

You might ask yourself, what does a thirty-one year old man do when he is home alone night after night?
They take illicit pictures of a hardwood floor. Actually, this is old pine which would technically make it soft wood. I know, what a gripping life I lead.

Anyhow, this is our dining room floor. We're planning to spend the weekend prepping it for a good, messy refinishing.

When we acquired the Devil Queen this floor was buried under a layer of thin plywood "sub-flooring" and a some fugly laminate floor tiles. Apparently, before this atrocity was committed, someone tried to refinish the floor. They never made it past the sanding. Judging from the floor's current condition, halfway through the process they decided that the horror was too much to bear, snarled a final "O, fuck it," and threw themselves, their tortured soul and the sander out the window to the hard, forsaken ground four feet below.

Bloody and bruised yet free of their terrible burden, they staggered inside and called the first disreputable contractor they could find. "Hello, it's an emergency. I need the ugliest green floor tiles you've got, and I need them now. And, while you're at it, do you have any fugly green shag carpet to match? If so, I'd like that in the living room and hallway. Can you start today? Great. I don't suppose - hypothetically speaking of course - that you know someone who could dispose of a drum-sander, discreetly of course"

Not that you can tell, but this picture is supposed to show you how much some of these floor boards are cupping. The middle of this board is at least 1/8 of an inch lower than the sides. The flash washed it out, but you can really tell where the board runs under this threshold.

The blue tape marks where holes have been drilled through the floor. Gary, thanks again for the sack of plugs.

So, thirty or forty years later, here I am picking up where a weaker, lazier (perhaps smarter) man left off. Let the blood sport begin.