The Summer of Smelly Projects

If we created a summer marketing plan, we'd call these months "Smelly Project Summer." We have a full queue of house projects. This weekend we put stain and polyurethane on the dining room and family room floors.
The dining room floor showed lots of scratches and marks. Some were the normal wear and tear of chairs moving towards and away from the dining room table. Others were along the dog's favorite path. The family room needed work near my desk and the coat closet. Both areas were aging badly.
We looked at the weather forecast to make sure we could leave the windows open as much as possible. We closed the first floor windows at night. The weather was nice enough for us to leave the second floor windows open a crack. As long as we could get some fresh air into the house, we could breath more easily.
The smell wasn't the only concern. We had to rearrange rooms to move the furniture off the floors. The dining table and chairs ended up in the living room. The family room items moved near the fireplace. It created a cramped situation that Holly did not like at all. She couldn't figure out where to go and how to get there. Her normal paths were off limits.
We were talking about when we'd be able to put the rooms back together. One thing we forgot was how long you have to let polyurethane dry before you can put furniture on the new surface. We plotted the times when we'd be able to put everything back together.
As with most projects, there was a side project. Our dining room set is more than 100 years old. The chairs gathered a lot of scratches along the way. At one point I said to Daddy, "We might as well do some work on the chairs."
We pulled the seats off the chairs and cleaned them. We put a light stain coating on each chair. The garage became the dining room chair drying area for three days.
Luckily we had plans that kept us out of the house every day. We left the fans running to keep the air moving and help the floors dry.
Now that the floors are done, we have other smelly projects including painting and more staining. I'd like to say that we have some grand master plan, but our projects are really weather dictated. We need to be able to keep our windows open for the smelly summer projects. If nothing else, we'll keep checking projects off the list as the weather allows. With a little luck, we'll check off most of the projects before we are no longer able to keep the windows open for days at a time.