The kitchen floor saga continues. Given another week of drying time, the paint seems to be bonding better to the floor. You can still scrape it up with your finger nail if you really try, but it's holding up fine to walking. Therefore, we've decided to proceed with the diamonds as planned. Once we're finished with the painting we are going to seal the floor with polyurethane in the hopes that it will provide a protective finish that will prevent the paint from scraping up.

In hindsight, we did just about everything wrong with this project. I was half way through taping the floor the first time when I realized that I should have painted the entire floor with one color and THEN taped off the diamonds to be painted in the second color. But at that point I didn't want to pull up all of the tape and start over. (That would have been the smart thing to do.) Instead we're doing this the HARD way. Will be another couple weekends and countless more rolls of blue masking tape before this "quick" project is done. (Apparantly there was a great article on painting a floor diamond pattern in a Martha Stewart magazine within the last year. Obviously we have not been able to put our hands on it.) -- Bill

Wonderful warm day today. Gay put another coat of paint on the kitchen floor while I worked on the back side of the smoke house; replacing more rotten clapboards. -- Bill

Gay and William spent the day at Enon Hall today while our well was being cleaned out. Provided great entertainment for them both.

We had had the water tested and it came back high for bacteria, the result of years of debris that had accummulated and fallen through a rusted out well cap. Albert Griffin (A.G. Productions) cut out thick roots that had grown through the well's sides and his assistants (Columbus and Junior) helped him dredge out sand from the bottom.

Finally they relined the well and proclaimed it "good to go."

Earlier this week, Mark Dameron finished the clearing job we started in January around the smokehouse, revealing the old farm fence that wasn't even visible before. Dramatic difference! -- Bill

Put a coat of semi-gloss polyeurethene on the painted diamonds the kitchen floor. I'm hoping that this will allow us to tape over these diamonds without pulling up any paint so that we can paint the other half of the floor and finish this project up.

Also started scraping the front of the gambrel portion of the house so that it can be painted this spring. -- Bill

Put the first two coats of paint on the offsetting diamonds on the kitchen floor. (If you're tired of reading about this floor, imagine how we feel!) -- Bill