do my kitchen floor (deep wash & strip, polish) and keep up with this; sweeping as part of nightly routine, deep cleaning once every 2 months, light mop every other week

a lick and a promise, as they say, today… before it had a chance to get totally el grunge-o.

(a month passing in the blink of an eye these days).

BUT.

As I write these words I have just completed a couple of hours on my hands and knees SCRUBBING, then waxing, the vinyl tile portion of the kitchen floor.

See, as I wrote a month and a half ago,

Part of problem is lousy paint job on the painted part of kitchen floor, which flakes off and gets tracked onto waxable part and is disincentive… don’t want to wax chipped off paint into my nice vinyl tile portion of kitchen.

The contractors finally (after only two years of the punch list remaining unpunched) fixed paint job last week. And they actually did something much better than paint: they got the floor sander crew in, stripped it down to the old wood, and laid three coats of poly on it. (This is what I had wanted originally instead of just recovering the floor paint, but that had insisted this was impossible). SO, after (another) week of kitchenless chaos (the first lasted six months, during the original rehab, when I had to move to a rental house, but that’s another story) the wooden portion of the kitchen floor is BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL.

This meant I could finally tackle the vinyl tile portion, and scrape up chip by chip by speck by fleck, the peeling blue-green paint flakes from the (formerly) painted floor… for although the paint refused to stick to the WOODEN floor, it seemed to enjoy bonding in pieces to the vinyl.

A major drag.

Scraped it, then washed it, then waxed it. Phew! But it had to be done, really, before I started moving stuff back in the kitchen.

And now I have a really beautiful, pristine kitchen floor, both wood and vinyl tile sections.

I did pretty well on the sweeping it nightly… I think I can make this part of my routine. And given how much more satisfactory it looks, and I feel, I think I could do the damp mop / wax thing…

I just know how time vanishes and urgent stuff squeezes out things like keeping a floor beautiful.

However.

Beautiful it is now, and I have a chance for a clean start.

So I’ll take it, and see how it goes.

Pretty good on sweeping, but the rest is just one thing too many.

Part of problem is lousy paint job on the painted part of kitchen floor, which flakes off and gets tracked onto waxable part and is disincentive… don’t want to wax chipped off paint into my nice vinyl tile portion of kitchen.

Supposedly they (the contractors) are going to fix paint job on floor around the 15th of the month, so maybe I’ll be able to get back to it, or at least closer, then.

For now, removing from list so I can say at least one sayonara to guilt.

and tonight I got down on my hands and knees and gave a good old scrubbing: major part of a deep clean. Most satisfying and didn’t take nearly as long as I thought (in all the time I was putting it off and beating myself up about not doing it and not having time). Tomorrow or the next, I will complete the deep clean, and, after locking up the cats, wax it.

And then brag about it here, feeling vary self-satisfied, no doubt.

Okay: my goal is: sweep floor nightly for the month of January 2006.