I finally feel good about the floors. They have mistakes at every level, sanding, staining, sealing and finish coat. They are beautiful to me.

I have the upstairs floors completely finished and downstairs I have one bedroom completely finished and the hall, power room and den are all stained ready for final sanding and finish coats tomorrow.

The living room, dining room and kitchen which are all one large interconnected room remain. I feel like they are possible now. Before I made errors and could not identify where they came from. Now I know what mistakes I made, and why. The biggest challenges have been sanding. Nothing I can find will sand smoothly and not make skating or gouging patterns. Tonight I changed my technique for the 100th time and found a way to sand without gouging or skating. It will take a very long time to do such a very large room but I am OK with that. I just did not want to still be making mistakes that were preventable before I took on the largest floor-real estate in the house. I was in a short hall when I knew I had it. I put stain on the sanding to make sure and there were only the marks made by the tree’s growth and the saw mill. I rocked back as far as I could in the small space of a hall and thought to myself, “Now. Now I am ready to do the living room.”

The past days working on floors have been complicated by me being sick. I would work on the floors some and come back to our little apartment and go to sleep for a while. Floors have a rhythm of sanding, staining, waiting, sealing, waiting, sealing, waiting and top coat and waiting and top coat. Each waiting period gave me the chance to take a nap. Tonight when I took my shoes off and slid my toes over the silken floor surface, I thought I could just take a nap there rather than having to go down stairs.

My floors are homely but more than that they are homey. We wanted antique looking floors. My spouse wanted them from pine. I struggled with the pine but the end result are floors that are perfect four our “new, old” house.

Our floors are warm and inviting and anchor the house well. Their imperfections will go unnoticed by most. Those who do see them will understand the character of the floor is in those imperfections. We are no different.