The great cover-up

The experts came and sanded and finished our floors this week, and transformed the house in the process, moving things a notch further from a building site and a notch closer to a home.

It’s hard to believe, but just three days have reinvented our scratched, battered, stained and mismatched floors as sleek,  silky, chestnut-brown numbers, with a beautiful wood grain visible underneath. It makes me very happy, and it makes me feel very smug about refinishing rather than buying new.

The finish is almost matte, but with a gentle glow, and the color is just a few notches darker than the cherry brown kitchen cabinets behind them. The floor guys told us we needed a dark stain finish to hide the blemishes, but regardless, this is a beautiful color. It looks warm, and it looks new. I love it.

But of course spouse and his workers are still painting, sawing trim and otherwise finishing the house, so the first venture of today was to cover all that beauty up again with heavy brown paper, transforming the transformation back into a building site pending the next stage of work. The finished floors mean the baseboard can go in now, and then the painting, and then who knows. We’re still sadly short of useful things like toilets, kitchen appliances and radiators, not to mention taps, a shower and a tub. But I think we’re almost running out of things to buy. It’s just a question of slotting it all in place.

Of course despite our best efforts, and despite a vacuuming marathon last weekend, every surface is again covered with a thick layer of grit and dust. How many weeks will it take to clean everything up and turn this into a place where we can live? How many times will we have to redo the same bit of cleaning before it actually looks good?