The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I’m not a meticulous guy. Not a bone in me is OCD. My engineer pals call me an 80/20 guy, only put in 80% of the work and accept the results. This week I rented a drum floor sander, weighed about what a car does and okay, you haul it up our stairs, see if you think you’re still young and strong. But okay, I did and now I feel old and plenty weak. What did I expect at 74? Although this isn’t about my geriatric condition, it’s about my inattention to details, the old ‘good enuff’ attitude I’ve had my entire life, sort of a hippie ethos. Not trying to be an expert, just, gee, get the job done and let’s move on. Plenty of other stuff needs taking care of, not really working toward a PhD in floor finishing.

But … if I’d hoped optimism and the Can-Do attitude would carry the day … I was sorely mistaken. It’s been a full day sanding down the old finish that looked like hell the last five years or more but I just kept procrastinating, putting it off year after year until finally, this week, I rented the sander and hauled it home, huffed and puffed the monstrously heavy beast up the stairs and plugged it in, figuring the last time I sanded these floors 30 years ago it was fairly easy.

Course it didn’t have epoxy finish on it when I laid it back then, tougher than nails now, tougher than my 60 grit sandpaper in a lot of hard to get at place, tougher than my own grit. By the time I threw in the towel I had plenty of deep gouges, rough corners, finish that sanded uneven — in other words, not the gleaming fresh hardwood maple floor I’d envisioned. Quite the contrary. Story of my life, really, attempting projects like housebuilding or guitar luthiery or furniture making without the proper tools, without the patience necessary, without the requisite skills and just hoping in the end that things would work out fine. The fallacy of this fantasy is obvious in the final details, a failure of craftsmanship, simple as that.

Today I’m questioning a lot of that hippie ethos of mine, licking wounds, kicking myself. Tomorrow … hopefully I won’t see all the mistakes. It is, after all, just a floor. We just put the scratches in ahead of time.

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