Gender Roles & Hardwood Floors

Lemme tell ya, it’s been an interesting few days over at the Vituperator household.

During my wife’s pregnancy, Milena developed this fierce nesting instinct. This instinct, for a person who is immaculately clean like my wife, usually translates to home improvement tasks, both big and small. Small tasks can be defined as keeping the rooms clean, making sure glasses of soda, water, cyanide, etc, are kept on coasters and making sure that dirty laundry goes into the proper receptacles.

Larger home improvement tasks would include painting the baby’s room, acquiring and moving the armoire to the baby’s room, assembling the crib, clearing the tree debris from our backyard and, most recently, installing hardwood floors where, for decades, there’d been wall-to-wall carpeting. Now, even if Milena hadn’t been pregnant during all these fun times, she’d still pitch these assignments over to me because, in her mind, this is guy stuff.

Let me give you a little background before I jump into my floor story.

My wife was born in Brazil, so while the Women’s Lib movement was gaining momentum in the states, Brazil pretty much stuck to old school, stereotypical gender roles. Women stayed home, cooked, cleaned, did laundry, dishes, raised kids, etc. Men worked, did yard work, repaired some stuff, hammered other stuff and either watched or played soccer all weekend long.

Now, before Milena married me, I shouldered the responsibility for doing everything in my house because, well, I lived alone. I did my own dishes, my own laundry, my own cooking, yadda, yadda, yadda. But, I did them MY way… and it was a way that suited me just fine. So yeah, maybe I’d wash the dishes, but wouldn’t always put them away. After all, taking a clean plate from the dishwasher when I was ready to eat seemed to work just fine for me.

When I washed and dried my clothes, I didn’t always fold them neatly and put them in the dresser drawers. Oftentimes, a clean shirt would only leave the “clean clothes” hamper when I was ready to wear it. Hell, I was lucky if I remembered to clean out the filter in the dryer half the time. And usually by the time I did remember to do it, I wasn't just pulling off lint - I was damn near pulling off a quilt.

Suffice it to say, my neat-freak wife freaked when she saw how I was living. The house was always a mess, but hey, at least I knew where everything was. So, upon marrying me and moving in, her first order of business was to do the unthinkable.

She started cleaning the house! (pause for horrified gasps of sheer terror).

All kidding aside, this was both good and bad for me. Good because clean is always a good thing. Bad because the days of easily locating my sh*t were long gone. Of course, Milena’s way is the better way, but it’s quite an adjustment for a slob like myself, even now. Maybe I’ll write a “Packrat Reform” blog in the future, but for now, I'll stick to floors.

Know this about me - I'm a guy, but I’m not exactly a Tim Allen/Bob Vila/XYY Supermale type of guy. Sure, I dig stuff like electronics, lifting weights, watching movies and football games in Hi-Def and going to sporting events, but when it comes to plumbing, carpentry, electrical work and other such manly endeavors, I am shamefully ignorant. Lucky for me, I happen to have a Tim Vila-type buddy named Joe.

Joe is the kind of guy that sets records for shortest amount of time needed to offend somebody. He uses foul language, hurls random insults, uses horrible names for people, yet just might wind up hating you forever if you piss him off even once. But in his defense, Joe is an extremely hard-working man, a devoted father and a selfless giver. He helps others whenever he can without asking for anything in return and he’s deceptively intelligent.

Furthermore, he’s the epitome of a man’s man. He’s a highly skilled mechanic by profession, but he also paints, does floors, saws wood, chops down trees, grills food, etc. He’s not a jack of ALL trades, but he comes pretty darn close. So, when Milena mentioned wanting to do hardwood flooring, he volunteered his services.

Obviously, the first step was to rid ourselves of these dirty, dusty, stank-ass carpets. Luckily for me, I still had the dumpster in my front yard that I rented after Joe helped me chop down a tree in my backyard, so I knew it’d come in handy for carpet disposal, too. Now, up until just over a week ago, if you entered my house, you’d see a very old and very stained blue carpet which covered the entire living room as well as the bathroom hallway. In the next room, there was this even filthier and rattier beige carpet which ended at the kitchen and, from what I could smell, seemed to have soaked in and preserved cat piss from like 1986.

So, one fine day, we uncovered a corner of the blue rug, expecting to see carnage and devastation. I was planning on buying a few hundred square feet of oak flooring, so the condition of whatever was underneath wasn’t a HUGE concern to me just because I figured we'd be covering it up anyway. However, we were very surprised to see that the floor just beneath the carpet was already in pretty decent shape. Granted, it was riddled with staples, carpet grippers and parts of the under padding, but it looked salvageable.

In the euphoria of having saved over a thousand dollars, we set a date of November 11th to start the heavy work, which would entail sanding, staining and polyurethaning (…yeah, I know it’s not a real word – shut up). My tasks, however, started in the previous week.

My first job was to pull out the staples from the living and dining rooms. As far as I could tell, whoever put these staples down to begin with either had a staple fetish or a seizure, so I had my work cut out for me.

After that, I needed to remove the carpet grippers, which if you’ve never seen any, look like long yardsticks (nailed into the floor) that have sharp brads sticking up to, you know, grip the carpet and stuff. A crowbar and hammer did the job quite nicely, albeit loudly.

Then, once the staples and carpet grippers were history, I had to try and scrape off as many of the patches of padding that were stuck to the floor as I could. So, by the time the eleventh rolled around, the floor was ready for some manly devastation.

Joe and I started our morning by hitting the Home Depot closest to his house to get some supplies as well as to rent this heavy floor sander. Since Joe had all of the experience in this field and I had none, he took it upon himself to do the sanding, staining and preserving. The sanding machine was pretty cool and seemed to work and sound a lot like a jackhammer, so naturally, I wanted to have a crack at it. Sadly, my diffidence kicked in a bit and, feeling like a dweeb for wanting to ask, I just kept my mouth shut and did the boring clean-up tasks, as well as some spot sanding where the rented sander couldn’t reach.

So, after staining, the last thing that needed to get done was to apply two coats of polyurethane. I did thorough sweeps of both floors and gave them the damp mop treatment before Joe started in with the polyurethane to minify bumps in the finish. It's been a waiting game ever since (each coat needs at least a full day to adequately dry).

So, for several days now, Milena and I have been staying at Joe’s house because trying to live in that house with those strong-ass fumes would have all but killed us and probably harmed the baby as well. Tonight’s the night, though! Tonight, we return to the house to check out the final product and try to get back into our regular routine. Tonight, we slowly start moving furniture back into the two rooms, since most of our crap had to be shoved into the kitchen before we could begin.

We may get a good night’s sleep in a familiar bed, but as they say, there’s no rest for the wicked. After all, we have a ceiling to paint, cabinets to fix, a kitchen floor to tile, a roof to reshingle, world peace to achieve… and the list goes on and on and on.