kitchenfloor

Aug '92

Ravenwood's Kitchen Floor: The Epic

   As we know, before I even bought Ravenwood, I started measuring the kitchen floor for black and white squares. Pal Ed (and set designer and builder) offered to help when his schedule allowed. He told me to take advantage of a 50% off sale Color Tile was having, and leave the squares in storage until he was available. My first walk through the store, no one paid any attention to me, and I decided on the $.73 a square tiles, on sale for $.37 each. On my trip back to the store, this shoe-salesman-turned-tile salesman practically met me at the door. I told him what I was looking for, and he immediately pointed out the not-there-before really thick black-and-white vinyl squares stacked next to us for $2.72 a square. "That's too expensive for me," I said. "They're durable--I wouldn't recommend anything else" he said. Then he went through this business about the traffic and how thinner squares will wear out, etc etc. I told him I was looking at some that were closer to... He put on a concerned frowny face and with great trepidation followed me to the $.37 a square stack. At this point I was getting concerned about the quality of these squares and he started in again on the value of the $2.72 squares. Finally I looked him in the eye and said politely, "Look, I'm NOT buying the $2.72 squares. So I'm either leaving this store with the $.37 squares or without the $.37 squares. Now then, are the $.37 squares any good?" He realized his fatal flaw, and began his back-pedaling by seriously thinking, then asking, "Well, what sort of traffic do you have? Any kids?" Nope. "Dogs?" No, nothing. "Ah, well, then! This is all you need!"
   Several weeks later, Ed found a chink in his schedule that allowed me in, and he was over from Athens by 11 a.m. He decided the toe-molding needed to be pulled up and we may need to pull up the existing linoleum, we'll see. Despite the sound of breaking wood, Ed assured me that the molding was not breaking, and we looked under the off-white and beige linoleum. "It's alligator linoleum!" he cried. Typical 1960's speckled. We ripped up the off-white lino and spent the next several hours deep cleaning the original linoleum (after going to the store to buy a mop), patching a ravine that travelled across the floor from the dishwasher to the stove, and preparing the primer (after going back to the store to buy foam brushes).
    The latex patching was "fast setting" so imagine our disillusionment when it remained damp for several hours, a distinct problem considering a second layer was required. There was also the issue of the refrigerator: Ed wanted to unplug it and leave it on the back porch so we could work around it, assuming I had no real food in it. I won that debate because I had fresh veggies stored in the freezer for the winter and the kitchen door was too narrow to let Ed push the refrigerator through. (This was a particularly unnerving problem, however, as we were laying tiles from the center of the room, so we couldn't lay tiles behind the refrigerator first, return the refrigerator to its corner and get on with it--we were going to have to lay the tiles in the middle and, toward the end of the whole process drag the refrigerator over new tiles, prime and lay new tiles in the refrigerator area and drag the refrigerator back over the new tiles into its corner.) We put on the second coat of primer in quadrants 1 and 2 and waited for it to dry entirely.
    By 5:30 Pal Mark, who had been spending the day with Pal Mike who chose to avoid the entire situation and was on his way back to Athens, called to see how we were coming along. I told him we were blowing on the floor trying to make it dry. "So you think you'll be putting the tiles down sometime next week?" he laughed. He was on his way to help.
   Ed begged me to let him put down the first tile even though I wasn't sure the second primer coat was COMPLETELY dry, as the instructions vehemently instructed. Finally I relented and Ed joyfully laid it, saying he didn't want Mark to walk in at 6:30 and not see a single tile down. Then he agonized me by constantly looking at the tiles and the line we'd drawn straight down the floor to make sure the checkerboard wasn't going to tilt off the corners. Mark popped in and followed in Ed's pattern on the second quadrant, occasionally saying "Man oh man the seams aren't meeting maybe I shouldn't be doing this." Then he'd look up at me and laugh.
   Hours later, when the patched ravine wasn't drying in quadrants 3 and 4, and all the tiles had been laid in quadrants 1 and 2, we decided to prime the portion of the quadrants leading to the ravine and break for a late dinner. I needed to feed Ed and wake up everybody since that refrigerator wasn't going anywhere without them. We got to the Olive Garden after 10:30, 30 minutes before their kitchen closed, just in time to hear our waiter get two ears full of whining obnoxious family members at the table next to ours, particularly the teenage daughter's response to them being out of cannoli shells by this time of night. Mark immediately went into his Ren & Stimpy impressions of Ren hallucinating that his bar of soap is a DeLEEEEcious ICE CREAM bar that someone is trying to take away from him. I'm giddy as heck at this point because I am beyond tired and I need to act completely awake, fresh as a daisy so Mark and Ed won't realize how late it is and give up and go home without finishing the arduous task in my kitchen. Ed tells our haggard waiter to take his time, as the river of latex patching in my kitchen won't be dry for YEARS.
   We return to Ravenwood and Mark tries to reconstruct the double-edged carpet lining by ripping the whole thing up off the floor and nailing it back down, punctuating his actions by saying "DON'T LOOK!" every time I tried to. When Mark got everything just so, Ed said "Marilyn, what did we have those screws attached to?" And I, remembering, returned from the hallway with the second half of the carpet lining that Mark didn't know existed. After several committee decisions, Mark hammered the darn thing down and I kept frowning as much as someone getting all this free labor could afford to frown about the now existing gap between the floor and the lining. Mark said, "Just don't look at it, Marilyn. It's like your tongue--the more you look at it in a mirror, you start thinking `Gee, it's purple, it's bumpy, it's wet--I don't want that thing in my mouth!'"
   I kept eyeing the refrigerator and the untiled floor space as Ed primed the now as-dry-as-it's-going-to-get ravine. I was hoping against hope that the two of them weren't going to be as exhausted as I already was, since the refrigerator was staring me in the face and all the toe-molding needed to be nailed back down around the entire kitchen. I could hardly hold up my head. Fortunately Mark and Ed didn't seem tired as they kept working away. Around 2 AM as I returned from throwing on another CD and Ed was beginning to lay tiles toward the refrigerator, Ed looked up and said, "Okay, Marilyn, where are the rest of the tiles?"

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