Y'all Hush: Part Two: Grandpops

Hey, y'all -

In May, Grandpops came to visit us from Missouri. Grandpops is one of those rare people who always has to be accomplishing something. If you clean the heck out of your house before his visit, he'll get restless and detail your car. I've seen him do it. Your dad is similar; sometimes I'll be cooking dinner and he'll ask how he can help and I'll say "Just stand there and keep me company." Then he starts kinda bouncing in place not knowing what to do with his hands, all anxious like a squirrel in a box and I end up saying, "Dang, never mind. Go away." He gets that from his dad.

For this trip, I thought we'd combine Grandpops' visit with re-doing our downstairs flooring. Tex painted the kitchen a lovely shade of orange while he was here, with a little help from Hagen:

Then once they left, I kept going and painted the living room yellow and then re-painted all the furniture in the living room.

The last step was re-do the living room floors that made me mad every time I looked at 'em.

The folks who lived here before us installed reclaimed fir hardwood floors, but the wood was too soft for that purpose so it scratched like the dickens and the planks were too wide so we ended up with huge spaces between them, a.k.a. Where Hagen Stores his Play-Doh. You'd have to scrape it out with a butterknife and shop-vac it to keep it clean and that's just stupid. Equally stupid was the pale yellow flooring in the kitchen, which guaranteed that every time you stepped in the room, you'd leave a dirty footprint. Like my clothing, I want my floors to disguise as many sins as possible.

Grandpops is a practical midwesterner, which means he's completely unfamiliar with the southern way of doing things. In the south, if a lady asks for help with her floors, there's a good chance the man in the question will say, "You just sit there, little lady, while I take care of this for you." Turns out Grandpops is a feminist (hooray! sigh) because he (rightly! sigh) expected me to work my butt off on these floors, too. When I said "Woo, this is hard," he didn't say "Take a break," he said, "You'll get faster." I wood putty'd every space in the floor and learned how to use a power sander.