Downstairs Floor

Yesterday morning L caught this little bunny in a flower bed.  That's his thumb in the picture.  He took this picture for his cousins and grandma.   We kept him in my chihuahua's crate, so you can't really appreciate how tiny he is (the boys think it's a boy).  He fit in the palm of my hand, bigger than an egg and smaller than a tennis ball.  He is the softest sweetest thing I have ever held... so tiny and delicate and vulnerable. We have a really bad track record with vulnerable little animals (or... I should say our bird dog, Powell likes to kill things), so our cousin, Maddie is caring for it and feeding it kitty milk with a tiny bottle.  Good luck, Bunnicula!

The downstairs flooring started out a combo of really nasty carpet and really nasty linoleum.  Dan spent days removing it all and mechanically etching the concrete to prep it for staining.

In the meantime I laid these sweet floor stickers in the mudroom, on the diagonal, I'm really good at floor stickers!  Who knew? After pulling off about 7 layers of old linoleum we were bummed to realize that the mudroom and bathroom floors are just plywood over the ground, no concrete.  That explains the mold on the baseboards.  Yikes!  We don't have the time to dig out the floors and do it right, so floor stickers on plywood it is.  Of course we gutted the moldy drywall.  I hate to store art so I hang it ASAP so it doesn't get damaged... looks kind of silly, though.

Alas, Dan's hard work did not pay off.  The floor color, called Tuscan Yellow, was mixed wrong and it went on opaque.  It was bright mustard.  We were expecting a very subtly warm concrete, like what you see in rest stops.  Are we the only ones who admire the floors in nice new rest stops?  ODOT and CalTrans have some sweet facilities!  Actually, the rest stop on the way to Virginia City is really cool, too.

Anyway, oops!  Maybe we should have just lived with the yellow floors... For now the floor is painted white, in the long run we will dig out the mudroom and bathroom floors, poor a proper foundation and lay hardwood on the entire first floor.  Our motto for the bunk house redo has become, "It's a barn."  We mutter that phrase in defeat a couple of times a day.   We have to remind ourselves we just need to get it livable so we can live in semi-comfort while we do a proper reno of the main house.
Speaking of semi-comfort, I am at the laundry mat.  We don't have wi-fi because the only service provider that serves the old farm isn't very... professional.  Hopefully next week.  I would rather have internet than a washer and dryer!  Gotta go... a really stinky guy keeps telling me there is only a minute left on my dryer.  Bless his heart, he means well.