Have you ever placed a stack of boxes in a corner of a room, even a room that is in constant use (e.g. your bedroom, living room, kitchen, etc.), with the plan to move those boxes to their intended destination (storage, drop off at the thrift store, a friend’s house), and months later those boxes are still there and you have become “blind” to them? It’s like you get so used to seeing them there that you no longer think, “I really need to take care of them,” when you see them. They have become an integral part of the room that you immediately look at, and it usually takes something like a visit from a friend from out of town to “see” the boxes again and realize that they don’t belong there. I did that. Several times.
Now, I don’t have a pile of boxes in the corner of the room that I overlooked, but I do have a big project that I overlooked when I was making my “to-do” list for this year. And it’s a doozy. But it’s something I’ve gotten so used to over the last few months that I’ve just overlooked it.
I’m talking about our soils. If you recall, I stained and sealed the floors in our bedroom not once, but twice. The first time I did it I stained them to match the floors in the rest of the house so they were dark. This is what the bedroom floor looked like after the first round.
And this is what the bedroom foyer looked like…
I had dreamed of having lighter floors, but I thought I had already committed to dark floors because the rest of the house had dark floors. But after thinking about it, I realized that if I wanted to change the color of the floors in our house, this was my chance. I had to start in the bedroom and finish it before I started moving furniture into the closet, foyer and bedroom.
So I sanded the floors again and repainted them in a light, natural color. I don’t regret this decision in the slightest. I absolutely love these light floors. I can’t even imagine our bedroom suite with dark floors. These light floors are perfect in my opinion.
But my “stack of boxes in the corner of the room” that I’ve gotten so used to that I’ve become “blind” to it is this very clear line between the bedroom suite flooring and the rest of the house.
This looks terrible. But it didn’t bother me because in my head I knew the plan was to whiten the floors in the rest of the house. There are five rooms/areas with dark stained red oak floors that need to be sanded and sealed to look like the bedroom suite floors – the living room, music room, kitchen, dining area (living room) and pantry.
The main question is to decide when is the best time to renew these soils. There are two issues I need to think about. I want to redo all the floors at the same time, not just one room at a time. The first problem is that I need a place to store all the furniture while the floors are being replaced. It seems logical that I should do the floors before I’ll start with my workshop since my workshop is pretty big and pretty empty at the moment. This would be the perfect place for me to put all the furniture away for storage while I redo the floors.
But if I do that, that means I have to sand the current kitchen cabinets.
And once I’ve accomplished that, I’m kind of fixated on maintaining the exact same layout for the new kitchen cabinets I want to build in the future. I’m not sure what to think about this. With the exception of the back wall of the cabinets, almost everything in the new kitchen will have the same footprint as the current kitchen.
This is the most important change I have planned for the new kitchen. Instead of countertop base and upper cabinets, I want to do floor-to-ceiling storage on this wall, and I don’t plan on having a center section that sticks out like I currently have. So I really need to think this through. I’m so tempted to just start on the flooring as soon as the bedroom suite is finished, but the kitchen seems to be my only obstacle.
One option would be to remove the lower cabinets on the back wall, redo the floors, and then add some temporary storage to the wall until I start remodeling my kitchen. I might even go to Goodwill and buy an inexpensive buffet or something similar to put on the wall. Or maybe there is another solution that I haven’t thought of yet.
Anyway, I need to figure out if there’s a way to get these floors done sooner rather than later. I just feel like now, before I start working on my workshop, is the best time to take advantage of the large, spare storage space I have in our backyard. Once this workshop is completed I will lose the free storage and I really don’t want to pay extra money for temporary storage.
