New (Temporary) Floors in the Dining Room

Of all the rooms in Pauline Manor, the dining room had the worst floors. Hands down. No competition.

That’s partly because this space has been through a lot over the last hundred years. Originally, this section of the house was the kitchen. And behind it was actually part of the wrap-around porch. So what we ended up with was a weird patchwork of subfloor layers: a little bit of porch wood, a little bit of plywood, and one section that had some sort of very questionable laminate flooring glued down. The kind that makes you pause and say, “Should we be breathing this?” We did pass the asbestos inspection, shockingly. But still. It was rough.

For Mother’s Day, Mike surprised me by picking up a big stack of beautiful grey LVP flooring to give the room a fresh start. We are not professional floor installers, and we were very realistic about the fact that this would be temporary. But we wanted something clean, neutral, and solid enough to live with while we figure out the long-term plan.

So we spent the weekend installing it ourselves. It’s not perfect. The room is nowhere near square, the edges are a little wonky, and the transitions still need some love. But it looks so much better than what was here before. It actually feels like a room now.

Of course, no project at Pauline Manor is ever complete without a little chaos.

On day two—day two!—Lando managed to destroy one of the “indestructible” planks. Naturally, he did it in the dead center of the room. And honestly? We didn’t even get mad. That’s just life with a herd of dachshunds. It already makes for a great story and adds to the charm in a weird way.

The dining room still has a long way to go, but this was a huge step forward. Sometimes just cleaning something up and giving it a new surface to stand on is enough to feel like progress.

Even if there’s already a dachshund-shaped dent in the middle of it.