OmegaMom

It’s amazing what things you find when you’re cleaning and packing and scraping and painting in a house you’ve lived in for nine years.

There are, for instance, the three boxes of toddler 18-month-size clothes.  I could barely bear to look through them, because it was a trip down memory lane.  The cute little grey footed pajamas that the dotter wore in the pictures we took of our first Christmas home with her…alas, those pictures are on the other computer, or I would post one of them.

We had received our referral in early November, and our agency said that we would probably be traveling in six to eight weeks.  The previous three months we had been working (very slowly) on the living room, pulling out the old early-’80s splotchy brown carpeting, scraping and painting the walls, and, most importantly, sanding the logs.

Hand-sanding the logs.

Which is what we had done in the utility room and both bedrooms…hand-sanded, slowly and carefully, sanded the “rustic” woodwork around the windows, and polyurethaned the logs and painted the window trim.

But when we hit the living room, what had worked in the much smaller rooms suddenly seemed to be taking forever–just like our wait for referral.  The 24-foot expanse of log on one wall was just overwhelming to us.

When we got the call, and the notice that we’d be traveling to China soon, we renewed our attack.  Sort of.  After all, we had six weeks to eight weeks to get it done, right?

Wrong.

Two weeks later, we got the call that we’d be traveling in…two more weeks!

Were we done with the logs?  Gawd, no.  Did we have carpet even ordered?  Nope.  Had we painted the sanded window trim and beams?  Nope.

Thanksgiving was coming up, which would automatically eat up two or three days in itself.

The 24-foot expanse just seemed more and more dire, as did the 24-by-24 expanse of flooring to remove nails from and screw down (screwed flooring squeaks a lot less).  OmegaDad and I were grim and determined, but it seemed a Sisyphean task.  The years of grime on the unfinished logs just weren’t coming off, and we were, by this time, sick and tired of hand-sanding.

Finally, the weekend before Thanksgiving, in an epic fight, I convinced OmegaDad that we should just rent ourselves a sandblaster and give it a try.  It would have been better to have a corn-blaster, as that’s the preferred way to go on refinishing logs; sand-blasting is too strong and shreds the surface of the logs, whereas corn-blasting is much gentler.  But corn-blasters for rent are few and far between, and expensive as hell…whereas you can find a sandblaster for rent at your handy-dandy local U-Rent-It place.

By the end of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, we had shoveled 600 pounds of sand into the sandblaster and out of the living room (post-sanding).  The grime was gone!  Of course, the surface of the logs was shredded, just as advertised.  But that shredded stuff was easily removed by our hand-sander, and suddenly we were making progress.  The blasted and sanded logs were smooth.  Sexy.  Alluring.  Easily polyurethaned.  A marathon two-day stint of coat after coat of polyurethane, and we were smitten by our newly gleaming and light logs.

We had also found that the local Home Debit had a relatively inexpensive Berber carpet that they would install within the week.  (It looked grey in the Home Debit store.  Really.  It did.  It didn’t look cream-colored.  No way!  Ahem.  It was cream-colored.  Let OmegaMom pass on some heartfelt advice:  Never.  Never, ever.  Do not EVER buy cream-colored Berber carpet in a house that has two cats, a large dawg, a husband who works with soils, and dirt roads.  Just do NOT do it.  Trust me.)

And we had buddies who descended upon us to prime the walls (24 feet with a cathedral ceiling).

We also had plane tickets to China, no living room furniture, and no more time.

We trekked off to China, leaving behind the newly refinished living room, with arrival back in the States circa December 22.

We celebrated our first Christmas with the dotter in a sparkling, light-filled living room with no furniture.  We were exhausted.  (Another piece of advice from OmegaMom–don’t start remodeling your home three months before you expect an adoption referral.)  But we had our darling dotter, dressed in her cute little grey bear-print footed jammies, and Christmas presents wrapped in colorful paper, and each other–and that’s what counted.