My favorite piece of non-serious art, a print by Peggy Corpeny, possibly because if I had any sense, I'd run away. (I have a favorite piece of serious art too, but I've never figured out how to photograph it without a flare somewhere on the glass. You'll have to come visit it in person. My husband hates it. He'll try to give it to you.)

We are tearing out the living room and dining room carpet and laying hardwood. The carpet is actually in good-enough shape, for being put down in the 1950s. It's wool and apparently indestructible, although there are some ripples where it needs to be stretched and retacked. There's a hole where a gerbil escaped from his cage, fell down the core of a newsprint endroll and tried to gnaw his way to the basement.  There's a patch where the sun shines in the dining-room window, fading odd shapes because of the stained glass at the top. Other than that, it's as forest green and nappy as it's ever been, and it's ugly.

When we moved here, in 1985, we planned to replace it. Then the children came, one after another in a succession so rapid that, seeing them together, no one could blame me for giving birth to all of them. We didn't have money for interior decorating. We decided to leave the carpet until we were done with baby spit-up. Then we decided to leave it until there was a reasonable chance no one would skateboard through our living room and dining room. Then came college tuitions, one after another, and we didn't have money again.

We're probably still not safe from skateboarders, but last month, when my husband asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I told him I wanted the green carpet to go away. I may not have been sufficiently specific about what should happen next. In my fantasy, I'd leave my green carpet at 7:45 one morning and come home at 5:15 p.m. to gleaming wood floors. Apparently that's not the way these things work.

The carpenter came. I love this guy. I tell him what I want, with lots of hand gestures, and he makes it happen. Only after I'm happy does he send a bill, and it's always less than I expect.

"Do you know what's under there now?" he asks. Oak, I tell him, good oak.  He wants to know how I know, and then I'm forced to confess the disturbing truth: because I can see it from the basement. There are floor joists, pine boards across them, at least in most places, and then oak across the pine. Then there's the cast-iron grate that was above the old coal furnace. Oh, and there's a patch where a piano fell through once. (We know this because parts of the piano are interred where it fell.)

"O-kaaaaay," the carpenter says, perhaps because he knows we always pay him the moment he hands us a bill, and our checks are always good. "Do you know how they're joined?"

They're not; they're just 1x8 planks, and what I want him to do is pull them up, take them to the planer mill north of town and turn them into flooring, and I want him to either match them or find something contrasting to make a border so that we have enough for both rooms.

"Why?" he asks. The mill sells new hardwood flooring; it would be easier to just lay another layer over this, and after 100 years, these boards isn't going to be in perfect condition.

"Because they're part of the history of the house," I tell him, and he grins. He can understand that.

"Honey ...," my husband begins. He wants to point out that the piano hole is part of the history of the house too and I'm not proposing to keep that. He'll also remind me about the moose holes.

A cool ceramic plate mentioned in the coming list, a Confederate $2 bill brought home from the Civil War by my great-great grandfather, and a corner of the rug mentioned just below as covering the moose holes, which should not have needed to be mentioned, but you know how men are. Bonus: the corner of a polished burl that I have to keep forever because someone I love gave it to me, even though it looks a lot like cow manure. 

When we moved in, in the place where my piano now sits — which is *not* the place where the other piano once fell through —  sat an ornate Victorian sideboard. Above the sideboard, secured by lag bolts that extended through the lap siding of the house to the sleeping porch behind, was a mangy moosehead, presiding over every meal and grandly dropping moosehair on every dish ever served there. The woman from whom we bought the house told us that her husband had shot the moose in British Columbia in 1914 or '15 and had brought its antlered head to Southwest Colorado on a train and then a wagon. It was supposed to sell with the house (possibly because her movers were very reluctant to embrace it while unbolting it), but at the last minute her son, who was well into his 70s, burst into tears and said he couldn't part with it. My husband was more than glad to facilitate their reunion because, he said, the moose had beady eyes (actually, one had been replaced by an aggie) and always looked like it was considering drooling. Now the bolt holes are covered with a Navajo rug because fixing them has proven to be a bigger challenge than he originally thought, which serves him right. I wanted that moose. It was part of the history of the house. 

My husband and I view that history differently. He thinks of the piano hole, the stairs across the bathroom window, the Pepto pink kitchen, the complete absence of square corners and all the little things that don't work because this is an old house. When he brings them up, I tell him, "Forty-two thousand." That's what we paid for the house way back when, and we never "moved up." That's why we have no mortgage. That's why we could afford to send all the kids to college and he can afford to indulge some expensive hobbies and I can pastor a church 50 miles away that can only afford to pay me $150 a week  — because I love this house, creaks and all. I also point out that his offspring were responsible for some of the oddities. We never had much time for child psychology; we were too busy dealing with Alarming Adventures in Chemistry and Physics.

Anyway, the carpenter shrugged, pried up the doorjamb and sliced the carpet from the front door into the dining room. Yup, beautiful, wide, straight oak planks, fastened down with square nails. I got excited.

"This is not better than sex," my husband muttered to me.

"Pretty near," the carpenter grinned. He had dropped to the floor with me and was running his hands under the edges of the carpet, wanting more.

"Ahem," my husband said. "I'm still here." Then he went on strike.

So today I'm carrying "stuff" upstairs. So far, I've moved:

•An oak child's desk from the one-room school where I started first grade.

•Two five-gallon crocks, a three-gallon jug and a 25-gallon crock.

•Three singletrees used behind draft horses on my husband's grandfather's farm. (He can't blame me for those.) 

•An ash-splint bicycle basket filled with curly-willow branches.

•Some plants. Ok, a lot of big, bushy plants in big heavy pots, each with rocks or ancestral Puebloan pottery or sea glass on top of the potting soil to keep the cats out.

•A copper wash boiler (also from my husband's family).

•A tin wash boiler.

•Three flatirons used as doorstops. 

•A rock painted to look like a cat. Or maybe it's a petrified cat. Anything is possible in this household.

•The piano bench, 8 dining chairs, a rocking chair.

•Two inlaid tables and an inlaid footstool built by my grandfather, a coffee table built by one of my sons and two oak occasional tables built by someone who's been dead since the 1850s.

•Three floor lamps. 

•7 baskets. 

•All the stuff off the piano and the bookcases, including a mantel clock, an inlaid bushel gourd, a hopi basket, a really cool ceramic plate made by a local artisan who started with a tracing of my daughter's hand, a deer antler found in our yard, a framed Confederate $2 bill, three sets of candlesticks, a couple dozen family photos, a metal replica of the child's book "The Poky Little Puppy" and a ceramic jar labeled "Ashes of Obnoxious Teenagers," a Bavarian beer stein, seven walking sticks including one with a genuine tortoise-shell head (the whole tortoise shell, in case you thought this was some fine inlaid piece), an Art Deco silver-jacketed shot glass, a collection of spiny anteater quills and, honest to goodness, a bone ornament intended for (and possibly removed from) someone's nose. 

Some more stuff, including a cool gourd. 

 My husband is not carrying anything up the stairs. He's "supervising," which consists of moaning, at least once per round trip, "Where did we get all this stuff?" 

Aside from the lamps and the frames around the pictures, I honestly don't believe we've purchased any of it. That happens to us a lot; it explains why we have so many children. It turns out that not intentionally acquiring them isn't sufficient; you also have to lock all your doors and windows and change your phone number. Otherwise they show up, needing a home, and then they're yours forever.

The trouble with stuff, especially the heavy oak stuff in which we seem to specialize, is that unlike kids, it never grows up and moves out on its own. It just sits around gathering dust.

But it's all good. Pretty soon I'll have a nice new old historic shiny ungreen oak floor. If it doesn't turn out quite the way I planned, no doubt we'll live with it for a quarter century or so. After all, we've been married for 30-some years, even though some days we like each other better than ancient green carpeting but not quite as well as, say, refinished flooring or a fishing trip to Montana.

If the results are really bad, we can always fall back on the Alarming Adventures. 

*Oh, good grief. For the benefit of the person who PM'ed me to express shock and disgust about my treatment of cats: No cats were petrified in the making of this blog.