The joy of improving small spaces

If you live in a 96 square foot house, it’s pretty easy to tackle home improvement projects. A home improvement project is on the level of fixing up a bathroom. It’s pretty easy to care about every square inch.

On the flip side, we don’t have the luxury of avoiding a portion of the house for a few days, or closing the door on our bathroom sized house.

So I decided, in our boredom, that we should improve our little house for resale value. our floors were old and absorbed water. *see the at-sea adventure they were coated in a few inches of water and constantly subject to wet residents*.

We learned boat floors are ideally a brilliant white holly pinstripe on a teak background. Our floors were just a bunch of brown. Home Depot doesn’t sell marine varnish, but luckily the man at the paint section pointed us toward a marine supply store near the boat and gave us his business name for a discount. We popped into the marine store and got a wealth of info from the ‘varnish’ guy, as well as a 40% discount on our supplies. Thanks Walt.

First step is a deep clean with soap and water, followed by a hard scrub with oxalic acid. When that dried I attacked the floors with Chuck’s sander, which meant moving anything that can collect dust out of the boat. We had a pile of cushions and clothes outside the boat while the sander screamed away.

Despite our efforts, everything was covered in sawdust.

The logistical challenge that we struggled to overcome was varnishing the floors while Eunice and Taylor roamed about the house. We decided that at midnight, the girls would go to bed, and I’d lay down a coat. I’d paint myself back into the corner of the bedroom and lock us all in, and hopefully, by morning, the floors would be dry enough to walk on.

I put down 3 coats, and each day the floors were tackier and tackier when we woke up, but they looked good.

The third coat took 72 hours to cure. The floors desperately need a fourth and fifth coat, but at 3 days a pop, we’re going to take what we can get for now. Its hard to schedule not walking on them 3 days at a time. They’re looking a lot better but it might be a while before I can post a true ‘after’ picture.

At the end of the flooring project, we intended to sail north for Catalina but the weather had other plans. A storm rolled down the coast pumping 40+ knot winds. Luckily Chuck convinced the yacht club to allow us to stay a few more days while the weather subsided.

40-knot winds and 20-foot seas don’t capture well via selfie

In our delay, we had some other highlights (in no particular order of significance):

We invited Bob Goff to dinner. He declined via email but we had a blast with Chuck and Kitsy
Taylor started a dog portrait business and it’s booming. Get in early before ‘Taylor Holiday Dog Paintings’ get famous.
I fixed our manual water pump!
Taylor diagnosed me as a 9 on the enneagram.
We finished all of the marvel films…(they felt like homework by the end).
Tay’s truck stored in Washington got overrun by mold.
My sister had a baby! Little niece Winifred Jane joined the family!