Floored

Last Thursday I awoke from an afternoon nap to overhear a phone conversation that has changed the course of my recent history.

My dad was on my porch scraping gunk off of the old maple flooring that my brother had gleaned from a work site then given to him and that Dad had passed on to my brother-in-law J, who didn’t want to clean it up and so gave it to me to clean and use on our new kitchen floor. My nephew and I had sweated it out of the cramped “second floor” of J’s workshop and I’d stacked it, bought a scraper, and had put in hours’ worth of cleaning the boards laid atop some upended trash cans.

I don’t really enjoy dirty work of the painstakingly slow stripe, so I was more than grateful for my dad’s willingness to jump in on the project while J was practicing tourism in the big city instead of working on my parents’ new house.

And since it was a day in general and a summer day in particular, I’d gone up to my bedroom floor for an after-lunch snooze, my timer dinging just as Dad on his new cell phone was saying words like “hickory” and “good price” and, “Does C know where it is?”

Someone had called J in the city to tell him about a good deal, and he called us. I jumped, and our speedy trip to town netted us a store-closing deal of some three hundred square feet of new hickory flooring.

Notice the fine trapdoor to our root cellar: the work of J. Also notice the commercial-grade finish on the floor (I’ll add one more coat, yet): J hooked me up with a professional flooring guy who sold me the stuff and even helped me put down two coats, and buff it.

(The partially cleaned maple is still on my front porch, waiting to be reclaimed by either my dad or by J, who my dad thinks regretted giving it away.)