The man who brought the the 3/2 Son Clave to rock and roll, commonly known as the “Bo Diddley Beat”. You know the groove. Think “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow, “Faith” by George Michael, and “Desire” by U2. Yunk a-dunk a-dunk, a-dunk-dunk. Yunk a-dunk a-dunk, a-dunk-dunk.

RIP

I’m flattened. Outside of a Hermosa hang for Naylor’s 39th last night, I’ve spent pretty much every waking hour since Friday evening sanding the floor down by hand with what now feels feels like an extension of my right arm, the Ridgid R2720 3×21 Belt Sander.

Friday night and most of Saturday involved extra-coarse 36 grit, taking down the high spots. That was a grind. Then I moved to 50 grit, running my buddy over the entire thing, taking off the stain. Although the stain ultimately came off, the pre-staining exercise actually proved to be a good thing, as the stain gave me a point of reference on the joints. For instance, if I was sanding on a joint, and the stain from one of the squares was unaffected, I knew that the adjacent square was a bit higher, and needed to be sanded down a bit. When the stain of a square became affected by the sander at the joints, I knew it was pretty much level with its neighboring squares.

I went through sandpaper like Henry VIII went through wives.

I finally got to the point this afternoon where I figured to take a much needed break, and save what’s left of my energy for next Saturday, where I’ll rent the monster multi-hundred pound drum sander. I’ll just have to live in squalor until then, leaving the plastic up, and relinquishing use of the front door for a week. The idea with the Ridgid was to get the most obvious high stuff down, which gives me more control than a large machine would. Relying on the large machine to take down those key areas could lead to larger problems than you’re trying to solve.

Going big last night, I woke up on about four hours sleep and sanded until 3pm. Had some breakfast, then collapsed into a nap. It was that whole “wake up from a nap at a dusky 7:39pm and momentarily think it’s 7:39am” thing. The lower body’s killing me right now. I think I’ll spend the rest of the night sitting in a hot bath and reading the last hundred pages of Angels & Demons. That kicked off excellently, then started bottoming out in the middle, and finally got going at about page 300. Now it’s hard to put down as I approach the stretch. I’ve enjoyed it, but I feel like the story could’ve been told in 300 pages, not 550. And now the few conscious brain cells I have left are informing me that I’ve taken this whole blog entry on the type of tangent that one only goes on as a result of UTTER EXHAUSTION.

Snapped these last night just before getting busy with the sanding. I tested things out with the belt sander using 80 grit, then got more ambitious and went down to the extra-coarse 36 grit. Worked ’til midnight last night, focusing on the quarter-inch deviation between the living room floor and that ripped border.

Getting there. This is a ton of work. Last night before jumping in the shower, I was completely covered in dust. Imagine if Gandalf was a surfboard shaper.

By the way, I quickly realized that the question “Will the stain come off during the sanding?” is a very stupid question. Duh. TOTALLY GONE, going down to bare wood.I’ll be restaining things after the sanding.

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.

“I am still learning.”
— Michelangelo

I trust you had a good Memorial Day. Along with paying some silent respects, I spent the entire weekend getting busy with the setting of the wood tiles. After ripping the two 1 5/16″ borders, we nailed in the first one on the soffit side. Then, starting at 00001 in the sequence, I did half of the the first two rows (the ones and the twos) on Saturday. I really got rolling on Sunday, after which I had the first two rows done, along with the wall cuts that start on the second two rows (the fours and the eights).

Not a bad wall cut for a new guy, I’d say.

Monday was a half day, completing the second two rows all the way up to the front door before running out of nails. And needing a break anyway. Shook off some pain with a long easy walk with the dogs.

My feet, my legs, my hands, my back, and my right forearm are all telling me to PLEASE STOP, each by inflicting non-stop pain from its respective area of flesh and bone to my consciousness. My toes are especially sore, feeling like every tendon in there has been stretched in a torture chamber.

Used 6D 2″ finishing nails along with some heavy-duty adhesive used for decks. After nailing in the border, I threw two toenails into each of the two exposed sides of each tile, countersinking each about an eight of an inch below the surface. The tiles closest to the border have a single facenail going straight down about an inch in. Before setting each tile, I ran beads on the underside, and did some shimming where necessary, particularly along the area of the wall heater patch. The nailing itself was a real pain in the ass at first, with about 30 percent of the energy going into pulling out bent nails that got fucked up beyond repair. Those wood squares are like rocks. Hardwood floor indeed. It was then that I had the type of special revelation that you might call the lovechild of laziness and ingenuity: DRILL PILOT HOLES FIRST. So I did, and it got easer.

I did some math and realized that, provided I swung the hammer a minimum of eight times for each nail, plus another dozen using the countersink, I must’ve swung the hammer over two thousand times. And that doesn’t include the pulling and re-hammering.

The final border was ripped at 1 5/16″, which has now become apparently and predictably too wide. So tonight we ripped it down to about 1 3/32″ wide, which is just a hair wider than the gap. To keep things tight, final accuracy will be achieved by shaving off the outside edge of each square tile in that row of sixteens. I would’ve liked to have the borders perfect, and just slam the last squares in,but it can be difficult to control hairline measurements on an eight foot strip of wood. It’ll be easier to control things one square at a time on the chop saw.

I need to pick up more nails and adhesive tomorrow, and aim to finish the final border and last row of sixteens by Friday night. Then it’ll be time to move paintings and electronics to the other room, plastic all the doorways off, and rent a sander.

Getting there. Special thanks to Hector “El Tool Hombre” Banuelos.

“Actions are the seed of fate deeds grow into destiny.”
— Harry S. Truman

There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West, and my spirit is crying for leaving…