Little black cloud of home improvement

This is a boring post which I'm mostly writing for myself, so don't feel obligated to read it. I'll post some before and after pictures of our floor project soon if you want to skip this one.

It seems like every time we do some remodeling or other home improvement we get to this point when everything just seems wrong and depressing and overwhelmingly bad. The feeling eventually passes, and things have always turned out fine in the end, but that little period when the black cloud of doom is hovering over you is always disconcerting.

We wisely decided to hire a professional to refinish our floors, but inevitably that evil gloomy cloud materialized today. The floors overall looked pretty good, but there was bad streaking in the dining room, some round stain spots in the main room, and a bunch of "boogers" stuck to the floor in random places. It felt like we must have hired the wrong people to do it and that we were fated to have ugly floors and that the floor would soon rot out beneath our feet and cause our family cancer and/or blindness.

I came home early in the afternoon to look at it again and everything still seemed tragically wrong - kind of like you just realised that you'd forgotten to take a college final, broken the screen on your new PDA, and left your child at the laundromat all on the same day.

However, I took a nap and then the floor guy came over and we talked about the problems. He easily scraped off the "boogers" that were stuck in the floor. That was just mostly gunk that got in after the final coat was on. It was very reassuring to know that that is normal. The spots on the floor were stains that wouldn't sand out (I guess you can expect that from a 50+ year old house.) He also reassured us that the streaking was just from some moisture content in the wood before the finish was applied. We then saw that some of it had already faded out where the sun had hit it, and it should fade out completely when it fully dries under the surface in a week or two.

It's funny how something as small as a good nap and some good solid information can do to change your outlook. Now I am actually very impressed with the job they did, and I'm soooo glad I didn't attempt to do it myself; it would have taken me a month to finish what he did in 2 days. So we now have a very nice looking floor.

Now the only problem that presents itself is that I feel I need to repaint the baseboards, touch up the dinged up paint on the walls, paint the closet, finish painting the kitchen ceiling, paint the hallway, etc... Oh no, I guess that means I'll have a little black cloud hovering over me again sometime in the near future. Dang!