Floored

Well my work on cleaning the house has paid off and I have cleared the floorboards in my office.

These are the original floors in all of their scuffed and notched glory.  They don't look as though they have been refinished even once since they were laid down 152 years ago.

Now here's the debate.  Do I cover them up, refinish them or clean the living daylights out of them?  Do I pull them all up and move them closer together or do I fill in the gaps with rope like they did back in the day?

I'm leaning towards cleaning the living daylights out of them and filling the gaps with rope.  How hard can it be, right?

Something tells me it will be an absolute bear of a job, but really worth it in the long run.

Decisions, decisions, decisions...

Good thing I'll have the winter to contemplate it.

Zen-i-less

I spent no time outside yesterday, so today I wanted to take a quick stroll through the gardens before I headed inside.

But I had to go grocery shopping (since I missed doing that yesterday).  Then the pup needed playtime. Then my DH needed dinner.  Then it was night.

This is why it's important to get these things taken care of on the weekend.  Preferably Friday night when the stores are empty and the food is fresh.

I could have really used just a few minutes outside - looking at the flowers, cursing at the weeds, picking a few veggies from the garden.  It's the Zen in my day that makes the week possible.

I guess I'll try again tomorrow.

Sun Day

My day was spent cleaning.  It's the first phase of closing up the house for the winter and I wanted to get a jump on it.  I thought it was a great idea at first.

Since our bucolic manor is an historic home, it came with historic insulation!  In other words, there's no insulation.  And since my DH and I are restoring and not renovating, well, still no insulation.  Instead, we block off all of the rooms that we don't absolutely have to have open for the winter.  This means that we basically live in 3 rooms - heating only those and any room that has water pipes (and only the water pipes).

I wanted to be outside just playing with our pup in the garden, or maybe going for a long walk, or just anything that wasn't cleaning.  But it needed to be done.

Besides, it's a great time to keep, toss, donate.  It will really pay off next spring when we reopen and just have to do a light dusting.  But then I realized that once I started a section, I had to finish it.  No stopping halfway.  No languorous breaks lounging on the sofa.

Maybe it wasn't such a great idea.