Working on Labor Day

On an American holiday honoring labor, I worked pretty hard! We are getting ready to put new floors in our entire downstairs. This has required a massive movement of all my quilts, pottery, dishes, knickknacks, even emptying out the pantry. I guess it is a good thing to have a major upheaval like this every so often. I found food in the pantry from the 90's!

Here is a piece of the new porcelain floor tile, sitting atop our awful old vinyl floor in the kitchen. Many times I have wondered, "What was I thinking?" when I put in white floors in a house with that had no grass in the yard, a black dog, and two teen-aged boys? The new tile is basically the color of dirt with flecks running through it that are Maggy-dog-hair black. Much better camouflage!

We also have to replace a rotten baseboard moulding in the dining room. When Charlie pulled off the old one, he took a large amount of my paint job and tore into the sheet rock as well. One of my least favorite tasks is repairing sheet rock (dry wall.) I got a pretty good product to help with resurfacing the wall. It's called "Fast and Final." You whip it up like icing and apply with a putty knife. It even looks a little like white frosting. Now I have to sand it off and repaint. And try to find a matching replacement baseboard, which is not sold at the big box home improvement stores. I will be really glad to get rid of this wall-to-wall carpet which has seen better days after fourteen years.

I also painted the pantry since everything was out of it, and have been touching up all the trim in the kitchen. It is nice to have crown moulding, chair rails, and fancy baseboard, but not when it is time to paint!

So, the weekend was not too fun. My son Dave and his wife called while I was on my knees sanding sheet rock. They were on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida! Grrr. No, really, I am happy for them. When you are still young, have not bought a house or had kids yet, that is the perfect time to travel and enjoy. They seem to have picked a perfect time between hurricanes to visit Emily's sister and her husband in Florida.

Speaking of hurricanes, we got two-and-a-half inches of rain here in Wake Forest, NC, and five inches at our mountain place from Fay. That was good news for our drought-stricken area. Getting so much rain at one time washed a huge gully from our gravel driveway here, but our next-door neighbor fixed it for us with a load of gravel in his Bobcat. Nice to know people with power equipment!

Gustav looks like it is not inflicting nearly as much of the damage caused by Katrina, but my thoughts and prayers are with those who are huddled in shelters, encountering flooding or other damage.

Hurricane Hanna is the next one to watch for. This one looks like it could really impact my state of North Carolina, either hitting landfall on our coast or traveling inland from farther south. You don't have to be right on the beach to be affected by these tropical storms. We lost power for eight days when Hurricane Fran stormed through in the nineties, uprooting trees all over the Raleigh area. And Charlie's sister in Asheville, a mountain city, experienced terrible flooding from Ivan and one other storm when her husband was in Iraq with the National Guard.

So, here's hoping that this next storm will be kind to us, and our state's piers and beach cottages will still be there. Here is a picture my father, Pete Turner, painted, titled "Fishing Pier at Dawn." Love these colors!