Okay. Got the tiles in. The three-day weekend continued all three nights this week, spending a few hours a night getting that last row of squares in there nice and tight. I had the chop saw out on the porch, and must’ve done a thousand laps from the floor to the saw, shaving off millimeters at a time. The trick is to really get each square in the last row tight, and then hammer the thing in. If it goes in too easy, you’ve cut too much off. If you haven’t cut off enough, you’ve gotta go back to the porch and shave off more. Not a gig for the lazy; lots of patience for disciplined accuracy required. My legs feel like they’re about to fall off.

Now it’s time for the first stage of sanding. A dude’s loaned me some good power tools: three different kinds of sanders. There are a few pieces up near the front door, black, that I’ll need to custom cut with the chop saw, with one piece requiring a 45-degree angle. That’ll be knocked out on Saturday morning, before about a half day of pre-finish sanding. Before I get the big machine for the fine finish, there are some higher parts in the wood that I need to level off. In particular, it became apparent that the existing floor on the old living room side of that old wall had been sanded down much more over the years than that first bedroom’s floor. So there’s literally about a quarter of an inch difference between the living room’s existing floor and the ripped border, which is made from a strip of surplus wood I’d pulled up from the bedroom.

Where the wall heater patch was is also a slight bulge that’ll need to be leveled down. I over-shimmed, and not entirely unintentionally. The last thing I needed was for it to sag. That’d bum me out. I’d rather have more shim in there, with no creaks, and then just sand the thing down accordingly.

Much of the ebony stain will likely come off in the sanding. I plan to go in there and mask it all off after the sanding to perhaps throw a final coat again. But who knows. It might look cool sanded. We’ll see how deep the stain went.

Tomorrow I need to break out the ladder and hang plastic sheets, moving paintings and electronics into the other room to keep them clear of the dust storm that’s gonna blow through here. Fun, fun, fun.

From Edward Johnson’s The Handbook of Good English:

Phrases containing numbers follow a few special hyphenation conventions. For example, prefixes that would normally be solid with the word described are hyphenated with numbers, as in pre-1980, the 8-fold way.

Exceptions from standard rules
Five hundred men modifies men with the adjective + noun compound five hundred, and normally such a compound would be hyphenated. But unless the number compound is complicated by another word or phrase, as in later examples, spelled-out numbers do not follow standard hyphenation rules when they modify a noun, no matter how many words it takes to spell them out: five hundred and thirty-six men.

Ten-dollar loss and two-hundred-million-dollar loss follow standard rules; the spelled-out numbers are like any other words used in compounds. When figures are used, one often sees a hyphen where there is no justification for it: $10-loss. This is as incorrect as ten-dollar-loss. But there is one exception to the standard rules. When a large round sum of money preceded by the dollar sign (or a pound sign or a euro sign, etc.) is partly in figures and partly spelled out, as in $200 million, it conventionally does not get a hyphen as an adjective: $200 million loss. One does see the hyphen occasionally, and though it can’t be called wrong, since it is there if the number is entirely spelled out, it is troublesome; perhaps the eye is somehow aware that there are invisible hyphens with the adjectival elements represented by $200 and wants all the hyphens in the compound to be invisible. Hyphens are used, and required by the eye, if such a compound is combined with another word or phrase that needs hyphenation: $200-million-plus loss, $200-million-per-quarter loss.

Similarly, adjectival compounds of figures + percent are conventionally not hyphenated unless they are part of larger compounds: 23 percent increase, 23-percent-a-year increase. This holds even when there is no invisible hyphen in the figure and my speculation about the consistency-loving eye breaks down, as in 10 percent increase.

Other adjectival compounds of figures and a word should follow the standard rules for hyphenation: 30-minute wait, 16-inch gun, 125-acre farm, and so on.

Spelled-out fractions
Fractions should always be hyphenated when they are adjectives or adverbs, as in They got a one-third share and The money is three-quarters gone. Opinions differ on whether they should be hyphenated when they are nouns, as in They got one-third of the money. By standard rules of hyphenation, there is no reason to hyphenate them; they are merely noun compounds formed of adjective + noun. However, the hyphen is “heard”–we do not pronounce the elements of such compounds as distinct words but slur them together–and omission of the hyphen could conceivably mislead: I used to save all my change in a bucket, but I’ve spent three quarters of it. I prefer to hyphenate fractions routinely. One can think of the hyphen as representing the division bar in a fraction in figures.

The horse rounded the track five and three-quarters times. Adjectival compounds of a whole number and a fraction are not hyphenated throughout unless they are complicated by another word, as in The horse fell at the one-and-one-quarter-mile mark.