Home improvement

When you are surrounded by piles of paper, stacks of books and scattered magazines and journals, cleaning up is very difficult. Home improvement projects, which require both cleaning up and eliminating inertia, are almost impossible. So when a project starts, even if most of it will be done by a paid specialist, it feels good.

Take the upstairs floors, for instance. Covered with ugly harvest gold carpet, the floors in two bedrooms were refinished some time ago. We left the other two bedrooms, the hallway and the stairs for later. One of the reasons was that when we pulled the carpet off one of the bedrooms, underneath was a cracked, broken and stained cork floor. Certainly very avant garde in 1960, when it was probably installed, but ugly now. And since we had already scraped the cork off one of the bedrooms, we were not about to do another one. So we lived with the broken cork, with the holes showing the hardwood floor beneath.

Last night and today we pulled off the remaining carpet (and all the staples) on the hall and stair floors. Unfortunately, under the carpet on the stairs, the steps were fir, the risers cheap pine, and the landings plywood. This required a quick change of plans. The floor sanding guy told us that he could deal with the fir, paint the risers, and let us figure out the landings. He couldn't install a new floor over the plywood, as it would raise the height of the step over the code limit. I spent the afternoon researching laminates, which should do the trick.

And though it will require massive disruption on the second floor, it should look nice and let us feel as if we have pushed back the jungle just a little bit. Of course, it won't have any affect on the piles of paper.