Off Limits

We made it through day #1.  Although we are very restricted in terms of what rooms of our house we can use, there appears to be a game plan.



The floor guys were no-nonsense sorts who spent hours just getting ready to refinish the white oak floors in the family room and the “pink room” upstairs.  They covered all sorts of things in plastic in the affected rooms and elsewhere.  This unfortunately makes it impossible for us to go from the kitchen to the rest of the house, including the family room, my husband’s office, the pantry, the bathroom, the side door.  A royal pain in the ass for us and particularly for Jake.  But after Wednesday the plastic comes down and those rooms can be painted and put back together.



We quickly learned that earplugs were a necessity if we were going to stay in the house while the floors were sanded.



Meanwhile I begged them to leave me a path to the piano in the living room, the site of much of the furniture from the rest of the house.



Jake spent much of the day being quite pissed off and barking incessantly.  He had not been confined to the lower section of our back yard since we retired several years ago.  He had gotten used to sleeping on the family room window seat or on a black leather love seat and occasionally scratching on the door to go out.

He was quite confused to find his food bowl in the kitchen and plastic draped over miscellaneous furniture everywhere.

In some ways it seems like the time of the 3-day power outage.  We’re sitting in the kitchen while ’24’ airs.  Going to bed is starting to sound like a good idea, even though the lights are still on.

We’re supposed to go to dinner and a celebration of Israeli Independence Day at Temple Micah tomorrow night.  I was agonizing over what to do with Jake, figuring we couldn’t just leave him out in the dark.  I called a neighbor to see if her daughter wanted to “babysit” and she graciously invited Jake to come to their house.  He will be so tired after another day outside that he will just curl up and sleep.  Now I’m looking ahead to Wednesday’s weather and wondering if he might like to spend the day in the car if it rains.

We quickly learned that earplugs were a necessity if we were going to stay home while the floors were sanded.

This sort of project is a lesson in flexibility and patience.  We tell ourselves it will all be over in 10 days or so, but life is definitely not easy meanwhile.