The intersection

This small area within the little farmhouse is like the intersection to the main living area; old kitchen; extension area and front door. Once we had freshened up the walls with some white paint and redone the shoji screens the floors were crying out for their turn to shine. I must also mention here that when we initially opened the doors to renovating (after being closed up for a long time), we discovered that a fox type animal, hakubishin had sadly crawled into the house and died on this floor, leaving it's mummified skeleton behind. 

In true Japanese tradition, we paid our respects to this little creature by placing salt on the area where it ended it's days. So, really it was another good reason for this area to be refreshed!

So let's reminisce about how tired these floor boards looked before their make-over! 

Try to imagine that just in front of that pine track are shoji screens, which I removed in order to sand and paint.

Using my best friend, aka my handy sander, I set to work sanding back years of old varnish.

Almost done...!

My assistant always appears when we reach this stage of the process!

So let's look again at the before.....

And now the after.....!

So now this area is able to hold its head up high. It also now houses the antique sewing machine and refrigerator for now. If you are a new reader take a look here to see what was happening underneath the floors boards before we reached this stage.

Piece by piece we are slowly pulling the flooring together with some elbow grease, varnish and love!