Our story so far: We stained the floor of the old Methodist church sanctuary in Acorn Brown, and it looked great. We were ready to move on to tasks that didn’t involve sanding or staining for a while.

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We needed to protect the beautiful flooring because the old church required a lot more work and a lot of contractors would be traipsing around. Tyler invested in a couple hundred dollars worth of Ram Board, heavy-duty cardboard that can be rolled out like a red carpet to provide temporary floor protection, and on Monday we rolled it over most of the sanctuary floor.

Monday evening about 11 o’clock, just after I retired for the night, Tyler’s phone pinged, indicating there was some motion detected inside the church. Sometimes headlights from passing vehicles set off the motion detector so this was not entirely unusual, but I was lying wide awake, so I looked at his phone notification and was alarmed to see a pile of trim scattered all over our newly stained sanctuary floor.

I shook Tyler awake. “Something happened,” I said as I dressed with the clothes on the floor.

“Huh? What? What happened?” he said.

“The trim fell down! Our floors!”

I ran over the church (Tyler chided me later for not letting him lead the way), and he followed a minute later. I flipped on the sanctuary lights, and we took in the scene. The sixteen-foot-long trim stored on a temporary shelf in the sanctuary was all over the floor. Our beautiful finished floor! The weight of the trim broke not the shelf but the window trim to which it was screwed. It had fallen with a mighty clatter.

We went back to bed, a little crestfallen, but when we cleaned everything up the next morning, we found only one big ding in the floor and only one broken piece of trim. As with so many events on our reconstruction, timing was everything. Fortunately, the shelf yielded in the middle of the night when no one was around and the floors were thirty-six hours post-staining so they were dry and covered by Ram Board. Divine Providence was overseeing our project.

Back to work.

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Today’s headline is a quote from American musician and producer Quincy Jones who, among other things, produced Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album. “Under the mooooooonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart. … ‘Cause this is thriller.”

Tomorrow: Chapter 35 opens with a new character joining our saga. Read about it here.