This week, I didn’t get as much done on the house as I’d hoped. Some of these tasks are just slow going. I did finish tearing up all the linoleum and plywood in the kitchen! The plumbing to the new kitchenette has been leaking into the cabinets and floor, causing some mold. The kitchenette is serving as my workstation for now, but will be trashed when I’m done with it. The excellent news is that there are SO many layers of flooring that the leak had no impact on the hardwood. It is perfect! So that glass is half full. 
The original linoleum was actually pretty funky and cool. I much prefer the hardwood, but it’s still different.
There are hundreds of staples in the floor. Hundreds. I have cleared over half of the floor. I’m getting about 60% of them out and using a punch to deal with the rest. A vice wrench has been the most effective tool for me in getting them out. My sweet, little Bean always comes downstairs to check on me and keep me company every couple hours.
By Thursday, I could barely move my hands, so I took a break from the back-breaking staple pulling to test different products to clean 95 years of grime off the woodwork in the rest of the unit. The bookcase on the right has been cleaned, the left has not. I can tell such a difference! The bottom left corner of the right bookcase was my “test subject” for cleaning and you can see that I accidently rubbed the entire finish off with my vigor.
The led me to testing different stains I had picked up to repair my overzealous scrubbing (and scrubbing off) of the finish. So much woodwork has been badly finished over the years. Bad, meaning runs. Drips and runs everywhere. I scraped the runs off and plan to patch the spots with stain that is a close match. Only time will tell if this move is naïve or awesome. So far, no stains have matched exactly. I will have to mix colors.
This week, we went salvage shopping and found all these treasures for under $200!
