Painting, Addendum

For my last post, some housekeeping--

This comment from Karen Deborah really cracked me up:

whew sounds like a lot of work. Ummm maybe you want to spice up your blog with some photos and some blog polls. sounds like your rough beams and plank floors would be better just scrubbed or something. Aren't those the character of old farm houses? Are you sure about painting those? Won't the floors chip and peel and get nasty?
I mean you are the one who said they are kinda losing it right now so sloppin paint around on everything might be something you regret when the sun starts shining again.
Besides prepping for painting is so much work you'll kill yourself with a project that big. Bake a pan of brownies and forget about it.

Okay, let me clarify about the old plank floors. Upstairs, I have lovely and gorgeous, if rough, but charmingly "distressed" (hickory?) plank floors. I love them. Downstairs, however? Not so much. This has has been around a looong time and it's been much abused in that time. The only downstairs floor we'll probably keep is in the office, which is the only room with an original floor in good shape. The bathroom is currently sporting particle board. The kitchen has new oak flooring that we laid last year and plan to continue out into the living room. Here's what you need to know about the living room floor:

1. It's rough. Reeeally rough.
2. It has holes.
3. It has cracks.
4. In some places, you can see to the crawlspace.
5. You have to be careful going barefoot in this room.
   
6. When we moved here, it was painted/stained in a full Heinz 57 of colors.
7. There are at least two different kinds/sizes of wood.
8. The whole thing will of necessity be torn out within the next few years, God willing, for the replacing of foundation and floor joists.
9. When we moved in here, we had no kitchen, so the living room served for temporary dining/kitchen space, so I had to be able to live with it, so I painted it a lovely chocolate brown.
10. Dark floors, believe it or not, show an awful lot of dirt.
11. I am a nutcase.

That said, she's right about the painted floor chipping and peeling and getting nasty. That's exactly what happened with the high wear this floor has suffered. The remedy? More paint!

So I figure, I can slap on another coat of paint (I'm thinking of a lovely "Chai Tea" color this time...) WITHOUT SANDING and it will get me through another couple of years until this floor is done for.

Painting a floor is hard, though. It involves moving EVERYTHING off of it and, well, NOT WALKING ON IT. And this room is the main throughoughfare of the entire house. But I have a plan. A plan of which I will most likely not see the insanity until I'm half way through the execution of it.

But I gotta say that the brownie idea is sounding better and better...