Mr sandman bring me some sanity.

Welcome once more to:

the diary of the unexpected,

the never-ending recollection of my questionable judgement,

the chronicle of my darkest moments

and the register of my deranged mind,

while I tackle the job of refinishing our wooden floors.

Sanding, some might consider, is one of the easiest jobs out there as is the machine “the one that does all the work”

You’re positively and utterly wrong my dears.

This are some synonyms for how wrong you are:

untrue, inaccurate, mistaken, unsound, bad, erroneous, awry, amiss, misguided, erring, out, askew, astray, at fault, defective, erratic, fallacious, faulty, inexact, out of commission, out of order, perverse, rotten, specious, spurious, unsatisfactory, unsubstantial, wide, counterfactual, false, miscalculated, fluffed, misconstrued, mishandled, goofed, in error, misfigured, not precise, not right, not working, off-target, on the wrong track, out of line, sophistical, ungrounded

So as you can see, there’s a reason and a perfect explanation of why I do shake like Harry Belafonte today, and no, I didn’t watch Beetlejuice last night.

The reason for my recent affliction and resembling one of the walking dead, not feeling my limbs and the overall overturning of the universe is no other than this element of torture right here:

The floor sander, a horror recollection of stories by Stephen King.

Or at least it should be.

Number one: this advert is a lie. Don’t be mistaken as there’s no way you’ll be able to clean all the floor in angle in about 30 seconds by passing just once on top of the area to sand.

I should have been warned, as the picture takes clearly after one of those awful infomercials where there’s tons of clumsy people that can even hold a knife properly and make a mess in the kitchen.

Rest assured that armed with my PPE, and buckets of willingness and naivety, I managed to fix the floors in my two days off.( it might look that I’m about to cook crystal meth, but don’t worry Mr Sander is waiting for me )

Before ( Daniels office ):

After ( Daniels office) :

I must confess that I had one of my world famous Maria callas moments in te process.

We run out of sanding sheets for the machine, so there I go all happy and steady to the town centre,

Living my very personal Dorothy Gale fantasy,

and when I’m almost in front of the sanding machine place,

I realised that I left my credit card at home.

The only thing I could see is fire,

Lots of it,

Burning hot, destructive fire.

So much fire that I would have burnt the f***** Munchkins in a bonfire and claim the land of oz for my own.

So after I had my moment, and I was back home, I finished sanding all three rooms and couldn’t be happier with the results ,

Here’s some of the process in the bedroom, where you can clearly see that with one pass through the floorboards is not enough.

Then it was time to stain.

In all my wisdom and magnificence, I went with Daniel to the diy shop to get all the materials I needed to stain the floors in a gorgeous shade of Jacobean Oak.

We did this trip twice as the first time they just had one tin left of the stain I wanted.

But because we’ve established than I’m an idiot, I didn’t actually buy what I needed the second time.

My brain got fixated in walnut.

It could simply be because when I started staining the first room I got brainwashed while listening to Tchaikovsky and a hidden demonic voice in the chords dictated me to buy walnut instead of oak, I don’t know.

The dictation said hellish red, so it must be some subconscious redhead people murdering obsession that I must have held from a previous life. ( A fortune teller told me once that I had been an inquisitor in the past, either that or Cleopatra )

And god knows that you can’t argue with me when I’m in B&Q, so Daniel thought that walnut was the stain of choice and that was the end of it.

If I would actually share my inner thoughts with my fellow humans and actually explain Daniel what’s going on in the house, I could had prevented the red stain fiasco.

In order to tame down the red ( it was very red ) I added some instant coffee into the mix and this worked a treat ), thank you Sainsbury’s-own poo poo coloured coffee!!!!

Just to clarify, now we own two rooms stained in walnut and one in oak, I’m the Punky Brewster of the homeowners. Mismatched and misunderstood.

Here’s the result:

I’m not too crazy about it, but neither I dislike it so much that I want to rip my eyeballs out.

So the redrum fiasco has ended being quite ok.

Not perfect

Just ok.

Daniel retouched the gloss EVERYWHERE after I made a mess of the poor skirting boards.

He’s also very kindly been digging in the front of the house to give me my Versailles front garden fantasy realness that my heart desires. If we are lucky the grass will start growing before my impatience melts the paint off the walls. Daniel has informed me that underneath the remaining slabs we have coloured tiles, like the ones in the entrance.

Bad news, they’re all crumbling apart as they’ve rotted away as an effect of being covered for so long. This is the look I’ve given Daniel when he’s kindly informed me of this and this was his answer too:

So far this is everything my lawyer and the loony hospital allows me to tell.

Will I survive this weeks painting jobs ?

Will I manage to unpack and hang some paintings and stage 2 of the bedrooms?

Will I spontaneously burst in flames the next time I have a hissy fit?

No one knows,

So stay tuned for more updates.

Love,

Ben