Istanbul was a beautiful city which reminds me of my recent trip to Puerto Rico. The streets are lively and full of energy. It’s a city of ancient history and modern marvels.

Here is the view from our hotel rooftop. We had breakfast every morning to a 180 view of the ocean. At sun rise, the prayer service plays over the speakerphones attached to each mosk, a wake up call for tourists.

We had coffee at a nearly coffee shop owned by two ex-pat’s from San Francisco. It was actually our only Turkish coffee of the entire trip.

The markets are vast. There are thousands of stalls, although most sell the same things: textiles, spices, and ceramics.

The Ayasofya mosk was my favorite. It was built in 360 AD as a basilica and later was converted to a mosk and then a museum. The tour guide said that it was built by hand in only five years, an unheard of feat.

A few weeks ago, I decided to undertake a massive project to refinish the floors in my attic. The previous owner had painted the floors with a chocolate brown over the original Douglas Fir old growth floors. After I removed one of the built in closets, I found some of the original unfinished wood and loved it. Below is an example of the various stages, painted, unfinished, and finished.

For one room, I attempted to use a soy-based paint stripper. The product was left on overnight and I scrapped the paint up with a putty knife. Stripped paint is really, really sticky and was a nightmare to contain and remove. Even after you scrape up all the paint, there’s paint residue that’s nearly impossible to remove. After two days of scraping and wiping up residue, I got to bare wood.

I used a 5″ random orbital sander attached to my Fein shop vac with a Hepa filter. I was worried that the large sanders at the home rental stores would tear up the old floors. For several days, I sanded the floors using 60 grit sand paper.

Below is what the floor looked like after I applied seven coats of tung oil. It’s a natural oil product that saturates into the wood and dries hard. It’ll never be like a plastic poly finish but it has that natural wood look to it. All the flaws of the original wood is still there, leaving behind a “cabin” feel.

Looking back, it was a crazy project to undertake. Would I do it again? Probably not. I sure got a lot of practice with the sander.

I’m transitioning to three simple categories: work, live, and play. In the past, I had a very complex organizational structure for the blog and it just became unmanageable. This is an attempt to replace Facebook with my blog as my go to source to post public information. Got a vacation coming up and some fun news. Come back soon.