more on floors

The walls are almost finished now—the giant section of plaster should be completely dry tomorrow, and it'll be time for a final coating of wallboard compound (and tape), plus a little more sanding on the northeast corner of the room. Everything else is finished, I believe.

More importantly, the last of the linoleum is gone (and the hideous felt and adhesive, too), and tomorrow, the sanding, staining and varnishing begins. From the few sections of the floor that looked rather fresh, I think it's going to need a stain—as it stands, the floor would be almost white.

While pulling up nails and linoleum and other junk, I found a quarter that had fallen into one of the layers—from the date on the quarter (1971), it must have been from the final layer. So now I have the earliest possible date for the floor, the terminus post quem as the Medievalists say (back in Berkeley, Prof. Stefanini taught me terminus ad quem and terminus a quo, but it's all the same). Fashion and sense say that top layer were put down in the 1980s or even early 1990s, however—the whole house had a mid to late 80s feel when we moved in, and certainly that's an era in which you would have painted your old cabinets white.