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.
....

Lousy perfectionist

Paint bucket and two dog leashes

I thought I was a true perfectionist, but in truth, I am only a relative perfectionist. This means that I am enough of a perfectionist to be bossy and dislike the active participation of my husband in just about anything I think I do better, but not perfectionist enough to not say "Oh, what the hell; it's never going to be perfect anyway" and let a lot slide.

I like to think that I let less slide than he would, if I were to let him do the things I kill myself to get done before he has a chance of helping.

It's been a headlong mad push to get a lot done, too, before August 15, when he is officially on vacation and will have lots of time to help.

No. I am being facetious, in part. I am the more demanding of the resident potential painters, as opposed to those who are merely residents -- I refer to Sam. I got him to sand a bit; next, I send him out onto the balcony with a box of cotton swabs and the base coat for exotic wood and have him do between the floor boards. I am being partly facetious because most of the real reason why I am racing to get as much as I humanly can done before the 15th is because I don't think that this work is particularly relaxing, as he says it is. I know because I actually do it. Come to think of it, I do feel kind of relaxed. Anyway, I would like him to have the chance of real vacation time at his family home in the Périgourd, where he loves to be. I don't, so I'd stay and keep working, like I did last year, except I shouldn't exaggerate with that.

And so, it has been non-stop since some time ago. First, the drawings for the paving of the upper terrace: the entry courtyard and how to handle it now that it will be filled with the new kitchen entry bump (and details for this, too, to get the top of concrete set for the paving material finally chosen), the walk in front of the house leading to the "petite maison", and patio for the two rooms there, including space for the table from Morocco. Then, the drawings for the new brick pillars at the gate on the street to the courtyard (fancy word for not much to write home about), and the low wall between the house and the pillars. Then, stripping and sanding the windows.

When Joaquim showed up a couple of Saturdays ago to show me what the bands on the house might look like darker, it came clear that the windows really do need to be natural wood and not painted.

This was not good news. Painting is much easier than stripping old windows down to bare wood, and it's right here that perfectionism is first in peril: the windows are old, they are not even all in the same wood, and I am not a professional with lots of specialty tools. We went to the store the next day and stood in front of the small wedge-shaped power sanders for small spaces and detail work, although not too detailed, as I have learned. I wish they made on dental hygenist-sized. We looked at them for awhile. I let Audouin look, mostly. I looked at Audouin looking at them, and I sent silent prayers skyward that he would see reason.

"Celui-ci a l'aire pas mal," he uttered at last. It was won. We headed home with our new Mouse sander and all the sandpaper pads for that one and the good old (useless, it turned out) belt sander we thought we could possibly need.

I called Sam down from his room, where he had been ailing (really) for the past week. He came down looking like he could strip and sand those windows just by looking at them, but I figured these are things a young man should do for at least an afternoon in his life. You know, to be prepared for the home he will hire others to tend to. Or, at least he is certain now that he will have the means to do. I know. I believed all through college and architecture school that I would drive a silver Porsche Carrera just like Pam Ewing. Meanwhile, I went back to my drawings.

"Tu ne l'a toujours pas fini?" asked my husband, making no effort to suppress his incredulity. I chose to let the simple answer suffice.

"Non," I said, trying to appear unruffled, walking away to the sound of power sanders filling the August afternoon air.

The work went on all the following week, and it was worth it if you ask any of us, including me, who did most of it. The windows are going to look great with a clear finish. There are traces of the old paint, but I made a decision to not fret about it. The bits of old paint tell a story, the worst of which is up on the transom over the bathroom French doors onto the balcony, where there was ample evidence of someone's delirium: acid green-blue paint on one transom window, smack in the middle of the house. Someone slapped some sense into the painter before he got any farther with that paint, and the whole thing ended up brown, then raw liver red sometime later before being partially painted white in a more recent time. The brown paint sort of melts and congeals when sanded. That's what motivated me to go get the Decapex on the third day.

The jolt came on the 4th day, when I took down the panels of the brand new kitchen window that was a replica of the rotted one. I was already unhappy about having to do it at all because it was supposed to never have been primed, but since when has anything that's been done by Batrénov gone off without a hitch?

"On est désolée, mais il a mis une sous-couche. Il pensait qu'il faisait bien." The carpenter thought he was doing a good thing by giving the street and kitchen windows a thin coat of primer.

"Mais j'ai demandé exprès qu'il ne la faisse pas." Despite my asking that he not.

"Oui, je sais." Georges knew. But hey, it's not like you can send two perfectly good custom windows back to him for stripping, or expect someone to do it.

I lay the first panel down on the saw horses and started the sander. The wood appeared. It was not pine. It was some unidentified exotic wood. This guy loves exotic wood. Worse, where the inside hardware was attached, the screw heads were covered on the outside with large rounds of very light-colored wood putty. This guy never intended not to prime them. He wasn't even trying for windows that wouldn't need painting, and I never asked for exotic wood because it would never have gone with what we already have: oak and pine.

This is when I start longing for the States. I have to tell myself That's where they have Glenn Beck and no universal single-payer health system, though.

Oh. You're right. Just sand and deal with it. It will be what it will be, ça va aller. This is why the French invented and perfected the Gallic shrug.

Georges came by one morning, three days into my stripping and sanding. He looked at the house as we crossed the terrace, and then he looked at me, his eyebrows rising to lift the bill of his cap.

"Vous avez fait tout ça?" I smiled.

"Oui." He walked over to lay his hand on the wood of the living room French doors, stroking it up and down the length of the grain, and then he turned back to me.

"C'est vraiment bien ça. C'est mieux qu'on fait nous." He was impressed. I, he told me, did better work than they do. This I knew. As flattering as it might have been, it was anything but reassuring. There is work still to be done that I am not at all sure I feel comfortable having them do, but there is no way that my husband is about to agree to get someone else involved in the project now.

I am preparing already for future need of my shoulders, drawing them up as I take a deep breath in and let them both go with a "Bon, c'est comme ça. Qu'est-ce que tu veux?"



Having gotten this far, it was time to attack the balcony.

In my mind's eye, it was ebony. Painted in a vegetable tar-based product, like this ecologically-friendly Donnos in black, or dark brown, black being my preference.

In Audouin's mind's eye, all was doubt. We went to Leroy Merlin and picked up a dark stain and a base coat for exotic wood. Exotic woods are greasy and release anti-oxydants and oils that will cause the stain or paint to flake.

"Je préfère le très foncé. Je l'ai toujours vu en ébène afin de racconter une histoire avec les motifs presque noir, qui rappellent le bois traité avec du goudron."

"Je sais," he said, "mais on peut toujours aller plus foncé." Yes, we can always go darker, but at 9 meters long with some 62 uprights, 7 posts and brackets, 4 horizontal bars, floor boards and beams, and miscellaneous small pieces to be covered with a base coat, and two finish coats, well, that's a lot of work to go through to get to a final decision, but I know the drill.

We could always redo it darker.

We loaded the motorcylce with the cans and a 60 mm brush for the larger work and headed home. I haven't stopped since, except now, to get this on virtual paper.

I was nearing the end of the first coat of "Rustic Oak" stain on the inside of the balcony when he came up from parking his motorcylcle last evening. It was nearing 8 pm.

"C'est ça?" he asked. Was that it? "C'est très clair."

"Non, je n'ai pas encore fait ce côté là, apart les barres en haut. Mais, oui, c'est clair." He found it very light -- surprising light, even -- and came up to look.

"Ca ne donne pas de tout ce qu'on montre au magasin." He was referring to the sample chips, where it looked very nearly ebony, unlike the ebony in another, lesser brand of stain, which looked quite ebony, and no, it didn't look a thing like the sample.

"Oui. Ils le montrent sur un pin clair. Pas sur un bois exotique traité avec une sous-couche."

"Tu pourrais peut-être just faire un essaye avec une deuxième couche sur un petit endroit, pour voir, et puis, si ce n'est pas beaucoup plus foncé, on changera. Ca ne serait pas un grand gaspillage parce que ce qu'on a mis protègera le bois de toute manière."

You could, he was suggesting, just do a small area with two coats to see, and then if it wasn't a lot darker, we could change. It wouldn't be such a loss because what we'd used -- at 77 euros for 5 liters, with only a fraction used -- would help protect the wood. So would what we will end up using, I muttered under my breath, not, however, unkindly. The rest, well, we could do the same thing with it for something else... or not.

Meanwhile, here it is.



I ended up painting with what looks like a calligraphy brush that I had bought for the corners in the orange room, which still aren't done. It is suppler and works better on the small surfaces for an even application. Audouin couldn't get over it.

Sometimes bigger isn't better.
....