Ready, Set, Go!

It feels like the lull before the storm.  Early tomorrow morning the floor refinishers and the painters will be descending on our house, hopefully starting in different places, to give it a facelift.

Today has been a day of clearing out certain rooms, only to fill up other rooms.  We boxed up breakable things like the glass in the china cabinet, the ceramics that normally  adorn our living room coffee tables.  The pictures have come down off the walls.



Tonight we made another dent on the piles of paper and overflowing files in my husband’s office.  I can easily throw out 50% of any file folder I pick up.  I was actually able to fill an entire garbage bag without any review of what I threw out.  Woo-hoo!

I’ve been telling Jake all day that he is going to be an outdoor dog this week.  If he stays inside, he will simply be underfoot as the floor people and the painters try to do their work.  It will be a true test of his Houdini gene, the one than allows him to escape from any enclosure.  Even if he gets out of the fence, my guess is he will hang around the front of our house because there is going to be so much of interest to him.

I picture tomorrow as being like an 8-hour MRI as the floor guys sand the two floors that are being refinished.  When they warn you that it will be loud, you can be assured it will be.  So I’m thinking of taking my laptop and escaping to Panera if things seem too grim around here.

Do you ever tell yourself “In x days, it will all be over”?  I’m hoping I can make that “x” a 10.  When I think of the months we spent living through the renovation of our house 10 years ago, 10 days is nothing.   I can’t imagine how we did it now, with two kids and two dogs at home and us both going off to work every day.  I hardly remember the inconvenience now.  But I do remember the myriad of decisions we had to make, from knobs to fixtures to appliances to countertops, and on and on and on.  At least paint color is about all we have to decide on this time around.

I’ll be checking in this week as time permits.  I think we should get to bed early so we’re through with breakfast by the time the first crew arrives.