I loves me a
black and white marble, checkered floor! Always have. Even as a child, when it dawned on me that someday I'd eventually grow up and have a house of my own, I
dreamed of owning a house with luxurious, black and white, checkered marble. I thought that would be the very epitome of class. As
Marge Simpson would say,
"it just screams Good Taste!"
Well, I never did get a marble floor, unless you count the "artist's loft" I lived in briefly, where I
faux-marbled the painted, wooden floor! (it was the "80's and everything
I mean everything was
fauxed to death)! Ugh, that loft was a nightmare --it had a
shared bathroom on each floor like some sort of
gross locker room. Yuck. ( This is only the sort of living arrangement someone in their twenties could put up with). But the trade-off of having
twenty-foot ceilings seemed worth it, at the time. This dump was also located in downtown
St Paul which at the time completely closed down and
rolled up the sidewalks at 5:00 PM. I was and still am a
"Minneapolis boy" and so were all of my friends and though downtown St Paul is only like fifteen minutes from downtown Minneapolis, it might as well been on the
other side of the planet because my friends all flat-out
refused to visit me in St Paul (
"It's just too --too far!")
PLUS, my then roommate at the time, the one who
tricked me into moving to St Paul in the first place ("Minneapolis is so
over!
Everyone is moving to
downtown St Paul!") totally abandoned me. The day we moved in he started dating some loser and I never saw him again!
But I digress.
So anyway, the SECOND my lease was up I high-tailed it back to Minneapolis. I rented a NORMAL apartment with
my OWN BATHROOM and everything. It had the cutest kitchen, with the original maple, glass-front cabinets and the sweetest, tiniest stove and the original porcelain sink with drainboard. Unfortunately, the kitchen also had gross vinyl tile in a very 1970's harvest-gold and avocado-green motif that I simply could
not live with. So I bought --guess what?-- new, peel-and-stick tiles in --guess what colors?-- Why, black and white, of course!
My current house (a 1908 bungalow) now also has a black and white, checkered floor but this time in historically-correct, real linoleum. (Easier to keep clean than the vinyl). I always think a floor with a check pattern looks better
laid on the diagonal and that's what I did both in my kitchen(s) and on the brand-new floor of the portico of
Merriman Park.
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