When mistakes are not lovely

Nap time in the Peaceable Kingdom

(That isn't always so peaceable. Ask the dogs about the cats.)

Yesterday afternoon, I was kneeling on the just fine grain sanded stained oak floor applying floor wax and carefully massaging it into the heart of the wood (I love that expression), when I heard the Fiat pull into the space between the old school (now three apartments, recently completed for rental) and Christian's house, just across from the window.

"Hi, Mom," he said from the sidewalk just outside the open window. I jumped, even though I knew he would look in and speak to me. I was waiting for him, even. Still, somehow I had managed to forget in the space of a massage stroke.

"Hi, Sam!" I said, as though I were completely surprised to see him, despite the fact that you can hear the Fiat's diesel engine coming from an eighth of a mile away. "How are you?"

"Okay. That color looks nice. It looks like it belongs in the house. That other color," the oak's natural color he meant, "looked cheap."

My mind flew to a blog post I had come across about dark stained floors and light walls, and how it made the floors look "sumptuous". I guess it was right, even though I already knew that. I have loved the combination for years, particularly after after having a home in Sweden published somewhere I have long since forgotten. We admired the floor together for a moment, and I could see the whole room, right in that instant, all done. The desk with its soaring bookshelves and tidy drawers for files, the shallow closet space behind the wood panels that are actually doors, and how cleverly they would store my ironing board and cleaning supplies, maybe some linen folded very tightly, the refinished leather club chairs and my gleaming blond mahogany piano, a kilim on the floor and lamps casting a soft glow on it all.

My little heaven on earth, my haven, outside the garden in bloom, and my husband's arms, of course.

"Well, I'm coming inside," he said, breaking my reverie. I returned to massaging wax into the floorboards.

This morning, I came downstairs to bask in the delight of my floor and buff it to a soft sheen, and I saw the very apparent marks of where the strokes of my brush overlapped when I applied the last coat of stain, or maybe the second to last. I was appalled.

It ruined my day. I sunk into a deep funk.

"Why could I not see this the evening before," I asked myself?

Myself shrugged and appeared nonplussed.

"How can you not care?" I demanded.

Well, what are you going to do about it? Start over? Sand the whole thing down and do it right this time? Get a professional to do it like every source says you should unless you are actually experienced at it? I didn't like her attitude. I counted to 10.

"Be quiet," I snapped, anyway. "Maybe it will look better once I have buffed."

Suit yourself, said myself. We both knew. I didn't want to let on, though. I didn't want to give myself the satisfaction of admitting that I hadn't done such a bang up job, after all, despite my glow from the previous evening.

"Mom?" Sam called from the living room. He was home to finish a project he should have begun months ago, or at least over the spring vacation that just finished.

"Oh, Sam!" I wailed, "Come see what I did. I messed it up when I stained the wood." He came up behind me in the small space cluttered with tools and looked over my shoulder at the floor with me. "See? Do you see how you can see where the brush strokes overlap? It's darker?" I motioned to an especially egregious area, where the overlaps looked like the arcs of the wave that has justed crashed down on the beach, those little arcs that reach the farthest up the beach and drag sand, pebbles and hermit crabs back down to the waterline.

"Yeah?" It didn't seem to shock him.

"It looks terrible. You can tell it's stained."

"What are you going to do, do it over?" He sounded like myself. Pas de question!

"No! I can't do that," I moaned, "that would be way too much work, and I'd have to rent the sander all over again."

"It makes it look authentic, Mom." He said "authentic" the way you'd say "vintage", with the same appreciation. I nodded. I'd take that. Authentic.

"Well, it will get covered, mostly, with a rug, so I guess it won't be obvious," I said to his parting back.

If that's true, though, why did I feel so badly all day long?


....

Of mice and architects

Baccarat models "walnut"

Or shall I say of architects and men?

Which, then, am I? The point is that architects ought not be mice. That's why Ayn Rand made Howard Roark an architect and not, oh, a social worker or something. One needs to be decisive. Courageous. Assured. San regrets.

Even when you have suspect you really have ample reason to have lot of regrets. It is, then, what it is. You have chosen.

Wisely or not.

Please, just don't let me dry up and explode before I get to see it waxed, in case it helps. A lot.

I went darker still. I started with one half liter container of "dark oak". It was too red.

I bought one half liter container of "walnut" and decided to use it alone, after having made a sample mixing it with the "dark oak".

My husband thought it looked very nice, but he added, "Ce n'est pas aussi foncé que le parquet en haut." It was true. It wasn't as dark as the oak floors upstairs, as worn as they are.

"Je peux rajouter une deuxième couche," I said, trying to sound decisive, but definitely not courageous, and certainly not avec regrets, but just the right amount of sans regrets. Reassuring, in other words. Rassurante.

That worked. We loaded the sander into the car, and I went back to worrying, in the sound insulated chamber of my mind.

What if you don't get it right? And do you actually even know what you want? Myself asked me. Tiresome little person.

"I am sure I will," I declared, trying to communicate just the right degree of assuredness. The problem is that myself can hear me when I am talking to myself.

Sucks to be me.

So, rather liking the walnut stain and thinking that Baccarat looked quite stunning on it, setting one another off to a tee, I got out a half liter measuring glass, several plastic containers from take home Chinese food from some restaurant other than the one over in Bonnières (they use those aluminum ones that pinch-over cardboard tops), and I dug out the cap from a bottle of Medi Bacter that has marks for 1 ml, 5 ml and 10 ml and started mixing up various blends of the new container of "walnut" and the container of "wenge" I had picked up. I made samples with the single coat of "walnut" and added either another of straight "wenge" and mixes of "walnut" and various other things.

I discovered that it probably didn't matter what the hell I used. Alright, not true. I settled on 1 part "walnut" and 2 parts "wenge". I said I wanted it pretty dark.

I probably should have just used "ebony" and called it a day.

It wasn't easy to apply. It tends to leave little glops at the joints in the flooring, even when you wipe the excess off with an old cotton t-shirt. It also doesn't blend as easily in successive areas as did the lighter stain. I am tempted to apply a third light coat of straight "walnut" to see if it works to even things out, but I am impatient and not sure it's worth the additional time and trouble.

Or, had I used a narrower brush, had one existed, that would have let me really go board by board.

I am obsessing.

I should have just painted it black.


....

Oak flooring in

Wisp naps on her dogs, to keep warm

Alright, so it might be a little chilly in the house, but just as I feared, May arrived and brought with it the April we ought to have had, complete with chilly temperatures, rain showers and scuttling clouds. I might have to turn the heat back on, and they aren't even selling firewood anymore in the stores.

What's up with that? It's never cold in the summer? Yeah, right.

Not that we don't have firewood. We have a large pile of very large pieces of aged oak. The problem is splitting them so they can burn properly in our little wood-burning stove.

Never mind. I promised myself I wouldn't tell too much intimate stuff here, and his cutting of the wood might just take us into that territory. My husband trusts me.

So, it's been awhile. Yup. I have been contemplating fiction. Real writing. A place for the stuff that gets in the way of writing here, where it doesn't belong. When that happens, I can't write anything. Been busy, too, laying the solid oak floor in the "petit salon", and feeling pretty proud of ourselves, if I don't say so. It has come out quite well.

Today, I ordered the oak threshold from the wood shop and stained the floor. The guy at the wood shop looked a little dubious. I don't blame him. You see, it turns out that the new slab and our oak floor are perfectly horizontal, but the terracotta tile floor in the entry is... not.

Not even close.

I noticed this before we laid the floor, but there was nothing to do about it then. Something has to be horizontal around here, and I wasn't about to try to plane the sleepers to make the wood floor meet the terracotta floor along the length of the door to the room, while managing to keep the tongue and groove flooring lined up and even. You see, at one corner of the door, the slab is 6 cm below the adjacent finished floor, while at the center point it is 5.5 cm, and at the other end it is 5 cm. The threshold will align with the floor at one end, and then stick up past it by more and more until it hits a centimeter of difference near the small end stair case.

Not good.

I asked the guy to make me a threshold that is 23 mm thick, like the flooring, but which is planed so that along one side it goes from 23 mm to 13 mm, while respecting the 23 mm at the other three perimeters.

He said he'd do his best. I am choosing to feel very hopeful.

The assistant asked when I'd like it. I hoped to look very hopeful and humble, while communicating my sense of urgency.

"C'est urgent, non?" she suggested.

"Oui, si possible," I said, nodding my head. She wrote "Urgent" at the bottom of the order.

I do need it to move the piano in more easily, although it would be a dream come true not to have the piano until the sheetrock is in place. We could lay the 120 cm x 300 cm sheets flat on the paper-covered finished floor, then lay down plywood as a cutting surface and prepare it in there, rather than have to do that in the living room and carry them in. But, I don't want to ask too much of Monsieur.



The two old carp and the new carp and shubunkin are still missing.

I am not pleased.
....

There ain't no sunshine

Buggley eyes

or something like that

We're at a standstill. I have called the mason. I left a message.

I have called the electrician. I left a message.

I called Georges. Voicemail answered and failed halfway through. I called again.

"Allo?"

"Georges."

"Oui."

"C'est Madame Sisyphe."

"Ah, oui." Silence. It sounds the same in English as in French.

"Ca vous surprend que je vous appelle, Georges?" More silence.

"Ah, non." He wasn't offering a thing. It felt like calling a guy who promised to call after your last date, and never did. Not that I was yearning for him, or anything like that. No fucking way. It's more like when you want to see just how big a weasel he is and how little courage he has so you can gloat in his misery, but not completely like that either. I just want my damn house finished, and I am so upset with my husband for paying them that 50% on the final contract before they finished the work in it that I could scream. For once, he is not defending his decision because we are basically screuxed of half our money because even if they do ever show up again, they will only do the very shittiest job they can for the sheer pleasure of getting away with it. My husband sees that now.

The lessons hard-learned.

"Georges," I went on, "ça fait une semaine que j'attends votre rappelle et ça fait bientôt deux mois depuis que vous êtes parti dissant que vous seriez ici à nouveau pour finir dès que vous auriez reçu la brique." I did not say that I know the brick has not been ordered. "Je veux savoir quand vous venez satisfaire votre contrat."

"Ah -- je peux vous rappeler? D'ici un quart d'heure... 20 minutes?" Like hell he was going to call back.

"J'espère que cela ne changera pas votre réponse," knowing full well that whatever he would do in the next quarter hour or 20 minutes would absolutely change his response, if it weren't just a way to get me off the phone and buy him a few more days behind which to hide. "J'attends votre coup de fil." I hung up.

Of course, he hasn't called back in the three hours that have passed since I called. I did alert our attorney.

Of course, the electrician hasn't called back. He might suspect me of being too liberal for his tastes, but let us hope it is not that. He let me know a little more about his politics than I cared to know, and I just might not have been quite adamant enough in my (lack of) enthusiasm for them. I did try to show the sort of empathy Barack Obama might while listening to a Tea Partier, though.

Of course, the mason is working like mad on someone else's job. He is nothing short of the most hard-working and efficient person I have ever come across, with the exception of one architect who worked with me, who will know exactly who I am talking about if she reads this. (Thank you.)

So, I am reduced to exchanging long gazes with the frogs, that or treating the roses and other flowering plants against the various evils that threaten them: black leaf, insects, Japanese Beetles, that powdery white stuff on the buds. I'd oil the teak furniture, but mon mari bought deck oil (no wonder it was so expensive), not teak oil for furniture, and he has the receipt to return it for the right stuff.

I could make drawings for the wood casings, cabinets and other woodwork in the "petit salon", but I am obsessed with the floor I cannot get done.

I am also obsessed with the misery of all the things weighing on me that more properly belong in the fiction I am not writing. Today, it all feels like too many drinks in a room with too much smoke the day after, and the sun has gone away for the first time in three weeks.

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone.
It's not warm when she's away.
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And she's always gone too long anytime she goes away.

How can I be reduced to thinking of my subs when I think of those lyrics, or of turning them around and thinking of my husband's toxic waste of a superlatively manipulative and narcissistic (the first goes without saying when you mention the second) ex when I turn them into her negative image presence in our lives?

The Clematis 'Daniel Deronda' bloomed today in its sad spot behind the stoop, waiting in its little store pot to be planted. It's a miracle it survived the year this way. Two others did not.

Murder in the garden.

Anyway, in answer to one reader, I can't go back on the solid oak flooring, no matter how tempting the finished concrete sounds right now. My husband would never listen to me again if I were to change my mind after all this. Besides, it's bought and paid for and been sitting in the "petit salon" waiting since March 24. I am also a stickler for solid wood, at least on floors.

When they aren't going to be beautiful finished concrete.
....

Fastening sleepers

From the kitchen window, today

the Wisteria blooms

Renovation work is incompatible with writing.

No, wait. What's that? I have been writing about renovation work? That's my principle subject matter? Oh. Well, then something has gone wrong because it's starting to feel like they don't go very well together, or I'm at wit's end and nothing goes with anything, except a headache and a foul mood.

It was all supposed to be so easy. In my mind's eye, it went humming along, everything falling into place. In reality, I can't even drag it along. If we are having subcontractors do things, they don't show when they say they will, but somewhere in the same month, or nearly in the same calendar week, if we are lucky. They sometimes call to say when they will come, or won't be here, but not always. If we are doing it by ourselves, we know very well when we will be here, but either the tools are inadequate, or the patience blows. Usually both, with an accompanying rise in cranial pressure and a sense of marital displeasure.

I cut the sleepers for the oak floor last week. Someone had to do it, and I discovered that I could. I lay them out, a little farther spaced than I'd like, but tough. So far, so good.

I even felt a sense of accomplishment.



It didn't last the week. When the mason didn't show Friday or Saturday to drill the holes he promised in the sleepers, since contrary to what he says should work just fine, we have destroyed several drill bits intended for concrete and the hardest stone using a 500 Watt drill making a very few holes in his slab to secure the metal framing system, I felt deflated. I started to want to drill them myself. My husband signed up for the job.

I knew where that was headed, and it went right there.

"J'ai pensée à quelque chose," he began. He'd had an idea, and the drill had been whining only a quarter hour.

"Hm," I grunted, trying to make it not sound like a question.

"Pourquoi on ne peut pas fixer les lambourdes en place avec des bouts de bois perpendiculaires?" He was suggesting a sort of framework of wood, with bits of wood leftover from his other projects wedged between the long sleepers, perpendicular to them. That was a lot of work, too, and unnecessary. Using sleepers is an old system, and a dumb one, if you ask me now. I am very aggravated with myself for not just nailing 3/4" plywood to the damn slab for a nailing surface and calling it a day. It was the guy at the wood place who talked about sleepers.

Sleepers with a nailing surface of 3/4" plywood would have been better, probably.

What's more, I realized afterwards, we tend to overlap and stagger the sleepers of random lengths, made from ripped 2x4's. These are just run the length of the room in single lengths.

Inshallah.

Anyway, you can just set the sleepers in asphalt mastic (hot poured or cold cut) and call it a day.

I launched into some explanation about changes in humidity causing the wood to swell or to shrink and how it could move under the nailing points. What gets into me? All I had to say was, "On peut faire plus simple," even if we have been accepted advice that makes it more complicated and difficult.

He went back to drilling, stopping every now and then to ask, again, why he couldn't just make a framework.

"Parce qu'on n'a pas besoin de faire ça. Laisse tomber."

"Mais," and he'd launch into the explanation all over again.

"Non," I'd say, and he'd return to drilling again, while I dreamed of cold cut mastic.

"Où est la scie de métal?" he asked as I headed upstairs with a cup of green tea.

"Sur ta table," I replied, not stopping. Then, I stopped short. "Pourquoi?" Why did he need the metal saw? I knew. I knew he as going to cut down the length of the concrete nylon nail anchors. I knew it because I know him.

"Laisse tomber," Never mind, he called back to me. He knew it was better not to explain, or risk a diatribe.

I swore to myself and continued on upstairs to return to my plank lay-out. Using AutoCAD, I had made rectangles of each length of oak flooring and copied them to make 20 of each of the 9 lengths. Then, I was laying them out over a copy of the floor plan of the "petit salon" to make sure that we used it in a way that made sure that the end joints in two adjacent rows were not closer than 6", and to make sure that the pattern of lengths was (sort of) balanced.

It took forever, and the drill whined on, despite begging him to stop and let the mason deal with it. If he had made a slab into which we couldn't drill with masonry drill bits deep enough to attach our sleepers according to practice, then it was for him to see that this was so.

Then, the drill stopped. I listened. I waited. It didn't start again. I heard his feet on the stairs.

"J'ai laissé tomber. De toute façon, je ne peux pas." I didn't say I told you so. I thought it, though.

Tomorrow I'll call the mason again, first thing. If I can't get him here right away, then it's asphalt mastic and that's that.

I also need more vapor barrier to lay over the sleepers and under the oak flooring. They didn't say I need it, but I don't feel secure.

I also have to call the electrician, who burned me the week before, and let's not even talk about the workers for the contract on the exterior renovation on the house. My head hurts badly enough. I hate this.
....