Huffing fumes

So we're at a pretty decent spot with the house. The drywall is done and today the hardwood floors were wrapped up today with an extra coat after some uneven drying overnight, and our cats. But I'll get to that crime shortly.

First off, Christina and the (not yet born) baby are doing great. She's been in the hospital for just about a week now, and at this point she can shower unsupervised, has no IVs and can even take a 20 minute wheel chair ride around the joint once a day. It's just a wait and see and if she doesn't go into labor by the 23rd, the docs will induce. It'll be at week 34, but that's ok.

So because of all of this I've been playing a pretty hard-assed GC trying to to get everything done right after one another. Case in point, the drywall wrapped up on Tues, and Wed the floors were going to be refinished. I had to finish some electrical stuff to get some lights on, as well as haul out a couple hundred pounds of trash created by the sheetrocking. But whatever, it's managed fine so far and my work is being great about my hours. I'm trying not to press anything, but at the same time things need to get done around here. Pretty fast.

The floors we have on the first floor came with the house and spent most of the past 40 years covered by rugs. When we removed all of the rugs a few months ago, you could really see that the floors were dirty and had never been sealed, and the same was true for the stair treds. Odd, but whatever. I'm sure you can traverse into the past blog entries and see the floors before. The pictures here are obviously the floors refinished. These were taken this morning and since then some spot sanding was done and another coat was applied.

A quick story: So last night it was really windy here in Philly and I had a committee meeting of just myself, and decided to leave the bathroom windows open in our suite, but close the bedroom ones. Well in hindsight that was a HUGE MISTAKE. At 1:45AM I woke up basically hallucinating and gasping for air. I opened both bedroom windows and quickly pressed my face to the screen to get fresh air. Dumb dumb dumb. Once the windows were opened the cross breeze was great, especially when we had gusts of 50 mph here in the city. But still, why did I do that? Nothing like huge amounts of VOCs in your lungs for 2.5 hours. This is why I'm not in Mensa.

So yesterday when the guys were in between coats I was running around the house trying to find the cats. The guys started so quickly after arriving that the cats had already hid and that was that. So in the end I just closed the applicable doors, and wished upon a unicorn's pot o' gold that all would be well when I got back in 8 hours. Well, the cats wound up being in the basement, and that posed two distinct problems.

Problem one is that the flooring extends under the basement door about 1 foot so that means the door would be opening and closing as they worked. Hmm...well that wound up not being an issue since the cats are terrified of anyone in work boots.

Problem two is that our genius cats can open doors. Bing has been able to open doors that open out (away from you) since we brought him home. And that skill seemed to have been on display last evening as well. Great, now let's book him on Letterman.

The pics here show the that once the cats opened the door and wondered into the stinky and sticky new world, that they left behind their Neal Armstrong-esc footprints. You can see Marco returning this morning to the scene of the crime...what a little s*&t.

Our guy Van was cool about it and spot sanded a lot of of the marks before slopping on the last coat. So I'm here in the hospital room hiding for a bit before I can walk from the front door to the first step of the stairs.

So that's that. I'd like to tell my mother that it was BING that opened the door, so that both of the cats are guilty here. Marco might be in the picture to the left, but he's there for demonstration only.