It's like new!

The next step in our kitchen remodel was to refinish the wood floors upstairs. We tore out several layers of linoleum in the kitchen--all equally ugly--and found a wood floor underneath. Rather than put something else in the there we decided to just refinish the wood, which meant doing the entire upstairs except the bedrooms, since that area is all connected. I was a little uncertain of what the floor in the kitchen would look like, since it certainly looked pretty terrible when we first exhumed it from the linoleum. But actually, we are really pleased with the result. The floors look great--and we have ample space to view them, since everything had to be removed from the rooms in order for the floor guys to be able to work. This meant that everything that we had already moved from the kitchen and dining room now had to fit into the den and our bedroom upstairs. As the picture clearly shows, there's hardly room to walk through the den, which now contains nearly everything we own. The floor guys came on a Friday and finished the following Monday, which meant that our fridge spent the weekend out on the front porch, since it wouldn't fit through any other doorway, and the stove is on the back deck. We weren't supposed to walk on the floor during that time, either, so after considering what it would be like to have the three of us spend the entire weekend only in the basement, we devised a method of swinging like a monkey around the corner hallway to get into our bedroom. There's a picture of Joe demonstrating this.

Don't worry--that little hole in the floor will be covered by a cabinet.