We’ve been in a Residence Inn for the past 6 days. It was supposed to be 5 days, but our stay got unceremoniously extended. The floor guys have been in our house, furiously sanding and polishing our wood floors. My in-laws are coming into town tomorrow; I wanted the floors finished, and the house tidied up before they got here.

Well, one out of two ain’t bad.

Actually, make that zero out of two: the living room floor hasn’t been done yet at all, because that’s where all the furniture in the house has been stored for the past week. Since we are late getting back into the house, I’m not going to have a chance to really clean it before my in-laws arrive. Yay.

(Note to self: when getting floors done again, either get prefinished wood or pay movers to move all the furniture out of the house so the floor guys have enough room to maneuver.)

The Residence Inn wasn’t bad — we had the “penthouse suite,” which had a loft bedroom upstairs for us, a murphy bed out of the wall for the kids (and if they were older, there was a sofa bed as well), plus two bathrooms. Free breakfast buffet every day; evening “light meal” buffet Mondays through Thursdays. Plus a pool and a hot tub that we visited every day, without fail. It’s a pretty good deal.

But I wanted to be home. We packed up this morning and I drove directly to the house to deposit all of the cold food from the hotel into our refrigerator. I opened the back door and went, “Ugh.” Deep smell of chemicals throughout the house. I don’t know what I’m going to have to do to get rid of it. I hope it’s safe to have the kids in the house tonight, because that’s where they’re going to be.

Once we’re back in the house, I have non-stop laundry to do for a few days, plus trying to clean at least the kitchen, the guest room, and the guest bathroom. (I’ll get to the other rooms later.) And there are 20 or 30 boxes just of ephemera that we’ve picked up here and there around the house, not including the boxes of books from the living room shelves. It’s going to take quite a while to get to a point of stasis.

I think it’s worth it. At the moment, however, it feels like a gigantic mess and mistake.

I’ll post pictures once the furniture is all back where it belongs.

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The street in front of our house is blocked off due to repaving! So somehow I have to get all of our bags and assorted detritus into the house from a block or so away!

Well, I guess that will keep down the amount of extraneous material in the house.

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There’s a guy smoking right by the entrance to the cafe. The wind outside is blowing in. The guy might as well be sitting right next to me.

Aha! This is why they have designated outdoor smoking zones in some cities, like Palo Alto. It all becomes clear.

I got a bee in my bonnet a while back that we were gonna get new floors, hardwood or bust. I hated the carpeting in our house for three reasons: it was old, it was orange, and it was stained. Basically, we had yucky carpeting.

I interviewed three floor guys, decided on one. Darin and I went to pick out the kind of floor we wanted, and for Darin it was no contest: he wanted maple. Which, hilariously, was the same kind of floor we had in our house in Sherman Oaks. Maple was great in that house because it’s a light wood and the “theme” of that house was Scandinavian everything. Maple is an excellent choice for this house, because there isn’t near enough light, and a light-wood floor really brightens the place up.

We had a vacation planned for the first two weeks of July, so I asked the floor guy, Can you do it then? Sure, he said. Then he wanted to let the floors “sit” for three or four weeks before he sanded and sealed. In the meantime, we could get the walls painted (since they really needed it and I hated the color that was on most of the walls, peach — combined with the orange carpeting I had a orange-y color headache every day).

Painting. Right. Let me get right on that.

Of course I didn’t get right on that until two weeks ago. Meanwhile, the majority of our small items in the house (all the books on the bookshelves downstairs, all the kids’ toys, piles of papers that kept building up in the kitchen with no help from us) were boxed up and stored in the three bedrooms upstairs. Not enough room to swing a cat in the two bedrooms that are being used, and the unused bedroom became a storage room, filled to the ceiling. And the floors are still unfinished maple, and I periodically pick up a splinter.

I talked to four painting guys. The first one, I realize now, was a bozo — he walked around the house, eyeballed it, then gave me a quote: $4000. The second one was more professional and seemed like a nice guy, but he didn’t have a licensing number and, while I realize a contractor’s license isn’t the be-all and end-all, I wasn’t comfortable. His quote: $6000. The next guy came recommended by the guy who’s doing our floors, seemed very professional, and wrote down every single thing, and he gave me a quote of $9500.

I said to Darin, “I’m kind of frightened what the next guy might ask for.”

I picked another name out of the phone book — based in my town, had one of those diamond thingees on his page. He came through, gave me references, wrote everything down, and gave me his quote: 1 week and $5000.

Woot.

I called him yesterday, said I wanted to hire him, asked, “When can we begin?”

“We’ll be there at 8am,” he said.

“Tomorrow?”

Yup. They were here by 8:30 this morning, and approximately 50 guys (okay, not really) covered my floors with brown paper and the rest of the house with plastic. Half the guys sanded down doors and window frames, while the other half painted all the ceilings. All the ceilings: done. They estimate they should be done with everything by Friday of next week. If they bring 50 guys every day, I’m thinking Tuesday at the outside.

Of course, the house will be set up for painters over the weekend. Little by little things will get done around here.

Anyhow, so this is what it looks like now. I’m hoping to have an “after” pic pretty soon.

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Of course, the first thing we noticed when we had the floors put in is that the maple doesn’t match with the cabinets in the kitchen. (Oak? Something dark and stained out of the early 80s, when this house was “remodeled” — in fact, what the then-owners did was tear down everything but the front steps and build a totally new house, which led to a town ordinance that when you remodel, you must keep two walls and the original foundation!) So we started investigating refacing the cabinets, and then how much new cabinets would cost, and then if you’re going to get new cabinets you might as well just remodel the kitchen, which we’ve wanted to do anyhow…

I justify even thinking about it with, “But I actually cook! I’ll use it!”

Sigh. The Money Pit begins.

(If you know of any kitchen — and, er, while I’m at it, bath too — remodellers in the Silicon Valley that you can recommend, let me know!)