[co-op] floor refinishing

Last night I set out on a guerrilla mission to do my part in the ongoing battle to rid our house of the Icky Green Carpet. Under the stealth of night I ripped up a third of the carpet in the dining room. The grossest third. I call it the Nemesis Carpet. Your eyes itch just looking at it. Under the carpet there is foam padding, and under the padding there is a layber maybe 0.25 mm deep of a fine-grained grey powder, the grime that's filtered down through the carpet over the decades. In many places the foam lifts up effortlessly, but in many other areas, fluid spills have turned it into a grungy cement. The only way to remove it is to rehydrate it, creating a nasty black slime.

Last time I did this I became violently ill for four days afterward. This time I was much more careful to create as little dust as possible, wore a dust mask continuously, and took benedryl preemptively. But it's still hit me, all those Andromeda Strain devils from that decade-old concentrated grime. My face is flush and draining through the nose, my lymph nodes beating.

But we are winning the war. The Icky Green Carpet was exterminated from the front room, and, grime removed, an intricately laid oak floor was revealed. Power tools were applied to remove yet further years of abuse, to draw out the white wood. Then five or six layers of polyeurethene were applied, locking in our hard-won hardwood floor in hard plastic. It is beautiful.