The floor is (mostly) done. Hooray. Last Saturday, armed with my dad’s air compressor and nail gun, and the remains of the jar of painter’s putty, Richard and I slammed out the rest of the flooring, and most of the rest of the trim. I ran out of putty midway through the afternoon, so there are still some obvious gaps that need filling (about half the master bedroom closet, and all the trim around the bathroom sinks), and there are still three transition strips that need placement. Plus the doorways look a trifle unfinished still (even those where the transition strip is in place) so those will eventually need some work. But there are no patches of bare concrete or underlayment to be seen anymore, and no big gaps at the edges that still require tiny pieces and copious amounts of swearing to fill, and what do you know, it actually looks really, really good. This is not to say that should we ever decide to replace this flooring that we will not immediately fork over the extra few thousand bucks to let the professionals handle it, but for two people who had no clue what they were doing, I think we can be proud of what we accomplished.

It feels good to know that the floor isn’t hanging over our heads anymore. Granted I suspect in a few weeks the lack of transition strips in certain areas is going to make me twitchy, but for now, I am content to just walk over those spots and pretend I do not see them. Plus, it appears that we were using entirely the wrong tool for trying to drill holes in the concrete, so if we can just get our hands on a masonry drill (I am hoping we might be able to rent or borrow one from somewhere), we’ll be good. And this afternoon we also bought another, larger, container of putty, because I know that even after I finish off the trim downstairs, there is much, much more puttying in my future. There’s one room upstairs in which we will be doing some kind of wall trim – either a chair rail (or chair-rail height wainscoting) or picture rail – so there’ll be lots more opportunity for me to scootch around a room carefully stuffing putty into gaps. Doesn’t it make you positively giddy with anticipation? Yeah, me neither.

We’ve been putting off doing some of the necessary repairs and alterations to the house til after the Dixon house is sold, but this week we finally couldn’t wait any longer. At some point Friday night, someone broke into our backyard and stole both our bikes. We’d had them chained to the back porch, but they simply clipped the cables (we found the severed locks in the alley). Ugh. So this morning a general contractor came over and took a bunch of measurements, and hopefully within the next week or two, the back fence will be completely replaced with something more sturdy and less see-through, and the storage building barn doors that lead to the back alley (through which the thief came) will have been walled up, so the only alley access will be through far sturdier locked gates.