Thursday, August 9, 2001

 

12:46 a.m. Already I'm nostalgic for the big dreary construction work that I only recently completed. After spending another futile day trying to put an outline together, I long for an easy task -- like ripping up a floor.

This one was pretty rough going in spots. Of course, it's turned out fine and the furniture is all back in place as I sit here tonight, but in the very beginning of the project, things looked pretty bleak.

See, we started out very small and conservative -- we really did. There were a few warped floorboards in front of the French doors, and the general wisdom had been that rain seeping in was the culprit. The idea was to carefully lift out the floorboards, run to Home Depot and buy some new ones, glue them down, and be done with it. Oh, and seal and weatherstrip the doors, of course.

Of course. The offending boards came up very easily. Too easily. I pretty much lifted them up with my bare hands because they'd been wet and dry so many times. And then, as I was sweeping up the gunk underneath them, I happened to notice that instead of underlayment, there seemed to be this red ... hard surface.

Could it be concrete? Wouldn't that just be the coolest thing? I love concrete floors more than I can say, ever since I saw them polished and set off with inlaid brass and glowing with an inner light like old, oiled parchment.

It has always seemed to me that this house should have concrete floors ... particularly since the wood seemed too busy and too varnished against the exposed beams and exposed heating ducts and the chain-link fences that make up the rest of the place.

And wouldn't you know it? The room really did have a nice red-tinted concrete floor when the house was first built. I pulled up a few more boards just to make sure, and then I had the interesting job of convincing Igor that it would make sense to rip up the entire floor, scrape up the glue, resurface it, seal it ... rather than buy a few boards to replace the warped ones.

He wailed. I've done this before -- a couple of times, actually -- and neither time did I do it right. In both cases, the glue did me in ... but this time, even though we really were trying to get the entire house in shape in record time, this time ... this time it seemed like the right thing to do.

As you can see from the photo, not every board came up so easily. The further we got from the doors, the harder it was. I bought my first crowbar and I learned how to use it. It took about a week to get the boards popped up and stacked outside. And then it was time to deal with the glue.

The glue (in every phase of stickiness) is another whole entry all by itself.

But those were the days, I tell you. Each night I took a hot bath and crept into bed vibrating with pain from overworked muscles that haven't been asked to lift anything heavier than a pencil for years. And if you're banging a crowbar with a mallet, you have to be oh! so careful not to bang your own ankle, or knee, or wrist, or thumb.

But I slept well, and when I woke up, even though I couldn't move right away, at least I knew I'd gotten some work done. Unlike these past couple of nights -- I'm right back square at the corner of Writer's Block and that old familiar Lack of Confidence cul de sac.

Maybe tomorrow? At least my data light has calmed down -- I found out that it was the Code Red virus that was being dealt with by the cable people, rather than some kind of assault on my personal little hard drive. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe I can try laying the chapters out on my brand new shiny floor ... it's smooth as glass ...