Oh my oh my. We have baseboard.
We bought our house five years ago after, for ten years, it was a quintessential college boy party bach pad. The yard was compact dirt and every wall carried a film of beer. A few years ago we had a dinner party and a friend brought a friend who exclaimed dude, my dope dealer used to live here. Aha. That explains the shreds of black plastic on the basement window frames.
Slowly we are fixing our little home right up. We thought we’d be finishing our old, beautiful, circa 1920s hardwood floors right away but it never happened. Partly because it is a giant pain in the ass and thousands of dollars and partly because some moron who loved brown shag carpet and didn’t like the floors squeaking nailed every board to the floor joists below. I mean, nobody would ever see it because who would ever want to pull up that luscious, marbled orange and brown blanket on the floor?
So sanding isn’t an option because the hundreds of nail heads would tear the sandpaper to shreds. And pulling the nails would not work because they are like three inches in diameter and eleven feet long. Or something close to that. And I am officially exhausted from defending our choice to keep the funk. I love it. It is history and that wood is beautiful. And I don’t want to schlep in more stuff because it’d really look great in here if you had new hardwood floors. I like the funk.
Andy has been denying me baseboard for all these years because *some day* we are going to buff and seal our funky floors. But it isn’t happening any time soon and I am constantly on my belly taking photos because I have a kid and animals who demand to be documented. So that’s what did it for me: the unfinished backdrop to my family photos, the sliver of shag around the kitchen, the puke blue plastic base that I now see because I am repeatedly picking up bug’s lid collection off the kitchen floor.
So I just said babe, can we pretty please lay baseboard and deal with the floors later and, perhaps, never? And, he said yes. And he did completed the project that weekend. And I nearly had cardiac arrest I was so pleased. Margot likes it better too.
