Weekend already!

I cannot make any extravagant claims of progress in any particular areas this first week of 2008.

Yesterday was spent feeling considerably better than the day before. I even helped empty out the two bedrooms at the bedroom end of the house, in preparation for sanding of the hardwood floors, which are badly in need of refinishing.

As I unscrewed parts of bedroom furniture, it occurred to me that my dad entered the hospital just a week or two short of the 40th anniversary of having taken possession of the house, which meant that some of the hardware I was undoing hadn't been touched in just about that long. Hopefully, as more and more of the house is upgraded, such perennially backwards-looking thoughts will fade. As an example, I am associating the den less and less as the old man's and more and more as mine.

The clock is ticking as far as refinishing is concerned. Yesterday afternoon, Galina and I took off for the Costco off of Old Country Road, not far from where it crosses the Meadowbrook, and the Home Depot on Hempstead Turnpike, not far from where its Meadowbrook exit. We procured victuals at the former, and rented a drum sander at the latter.

It'd be nice to get the sander back by the end of the day today, i.e., within 24 hours.

The video compiled and edited by Eugene L., one of the Russian interpreters during my most recent (and very likely last) campaign in Kazakhstan, finally arrived yesterday. I won't play as a DVD on our cheap Coby unit, but it does play on my computer. I only took a look at a few minutes of the product, and it looks pretty good. I look forward to seeing the whole thing.

I have not yet developed Feht's hair-trigger paranoia that kicks in after a few days of no calls with new work. However, I am not far from that point, I can tell. Hopefully, the tantalizing email I got just before the New Year, concerning several weeks of work, will play itself out early next week.

It's off to finish breakfast and to work!

Cheers...

Sanding floors...

Shelling out $50+ for each day's use of a drum sander provides a marvelous incentive to use it with little delay. What I didn't notice this morning upon starting to use the unit was a thick layer of what looked like a mixture of clay and fine sawdust stuck to most surfaces in the area of the drum, which in short order fouled the first belt that I put on the machine.

After vainly trying to clean the gunk out of the unit without actually disassembling it, I returned to the Home Depot and traded the machine in for a different one. This one didn't foul belts, but it also had a blockage in the line going to the sawdust bag, so we ended up running the vacuum cleaner every few minutes to get rid of the sawdust that didn't get picked up.

The lesson learned? Plug in the equipment at the rental place. Check it out.

Stripping floors, even with a belt sander to do the lion's share of the labor, is hard work. But because of its size, it can't get into the corners or strip sections that are too narrow to allow maneuvering. That means I'm nowhere near finished with the stripping job.

But I sure have a good start!

Cheers...