wood floors – Go Retire Psychiatrist

It’s week 2 of camping out in our basement because our wood floors underwent sanding and resealing. Today, the workers finished up and the floors look great.

But we still can’t move back upstairs because that would ruin the finish just applied on the floors. The final coat went on last Friday. It’ll be this coming Friday before we can move furniture back. We can’t even walk on them unless we’re in stocking feet. We have not mastered the art of levitation, which, incidentally, you can learn at the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. Well, maybe that’s more like butt-hopping, otherwise known as yogic flying.

The views from our downstairs windows display the back yard, which has been full of birds feasting on the berries on the trees out there. I think those are Winterberry trees. The deer munch on the leaves. Blue jays, it turns out, save nuts and berries for later by hiding them under leaves.

So, we’re still in the basement, sleeping on the air mattresses. It’s pretty much like sleeping on the floor. We’ve discovered there’s a trick to getting in and out of them, since they’re only 12 inches high. I call it “roll in and roll out.” At first, I noticed that my calves were pretty sore after the first night. It turns out it was because I was trying to get off the air mattress the same way I get out of our regular bed. Because I swung my feet out first and tried to stand, it was like trying to do major squat exercises. I usually just sat back down pretty hard. It’s a lot like yogic flying.

Now I roll out on my hands and knees, which makes it easier to gather my legs under me and get on my feet. Getting into the air mattress is just the reverse.

I suppose we could have avoided these gymnastics by buying a queen size air mattress. It’s more the height of a regular bed—but that would have cost hundreds of dollars, believe it or not. Sena bought ours for a fraction of the price.

It’s good to be frugal.

We’ve been camping in our basement since yesterday. We’re having our upper level wood floors sanded and resealed. This has led to a new sense of togetherness for me and Sena. We had to get all the furniture off the floor. We were lucky enough to be able to find places to move them.

We briefly considered renting a motel room for the duration. However, the cost would outweigh the inconvenience. We opted for the total inconvenience plan. This meant we had to make the basement as comfortable as possible. We had to think of all the necessities and some of the conveniences we take for granted on the upper level and somehow make those happen downstairs.

Sena came up with the idea to use air mattresses. We’ve never used them before. I had visions of me turning blue trying to blow them up. I can’t even blow up a toy balloon. Fortunately, Sena found a model that inflates just by plugging it into a regular electrical outlet and turning a knob. It doesn’t stop filling automatically, though. The instructions warn you not to inflate more than 5 minutes because that could burn out the motor. But there is no warning about the danger of an exploding air mattress. Be careful with the levitation mode.

The last two days have been pretty noisy. If you’ve ever listened to heavy duty sanding machines, the din is tremendous and nearly constant all day long. It’s like living in a giant’s wood shop. When the screeching stops, the buzzing starts. When the buzzing stops, the whirring starts. In fact, the sound is similar to the noise of Frank’s stump grinder (see post 10/2/2020). We were a little surprised when one of the workers sanded all the way through the floor and landed on our new folding table while we were having lunch. Good workers like that are hard to find.

Sanding wood floors raises a regular haboob of dust, so we were sort of barricaded by heavy plastic on the stairway. We could sometimes hear the workers sneeze and cough, but most of the time they were muffled by masks. We never needed to wear masks against the dust because of the measures the workers took to protect us. We wore them when we talked face to face with them for the same reason—to protect them (and us) from coronavirus.

Heavy sanding also raises the temperature and it got pretty warm upstairs. On the other hand, it tends to be chillier downstairs and the furnace doesn’t come on. We’re lucky to have a little space heater.

I mentioned togetherness earlier and a smaller space like the basement has brought us together more. It’s more crowded in the kitchen (I guess I should say wet bar). The refrigerator is a blessing, even if it’s smaller. Doing the dishes can be a little bumpy, but we haven’t broken anything—yet.