Take samples to your local cooperative extension service and they will identify it for you. Take many samples, like a handful of grass (with roots), from several areas to be sure you are sampling the different types that might be in your mix.

Since this is an outer wall, I'll wager this is thermal expansion/contraction of the piping or heating elements. When I was very young, the house had a family room that had been converted from a screened porch. A loop of hydronic baseboard heat was the easiest to add to a system that had radiators elsewhere. As the heat would come on, one could hear the baseboards creaking with expansion, which would occur sequentially around the room. Sounded like some small and not especially energetic critter making the rounds. If you don't see droppings, you don't have mice. Snakes, maybe, but not mice.... ;-) Cheers

While some fabrics have applied "finishes", many of those are not really washable. A well-known example is chintz decorating fabric often made into curtains. It has a subtle sheen, but if you wash it the sheen disappears, leaving just the printed colors on the fabric. Some people like chintz even better after it's been washed, however. Some modern fabrics have resins embedded in the fabric to assist in preventing wrinkles. This is the basis of the wash and wear dress shirts, for example. Those resins do wear away over the course of a large number of washes, so perhaps that's what the salesman had in mind. Personally I find the added resins unpleasant so I try never to buy fabrics treated with them. Finally most white fabris and clothing sold in the US are treated with optical brightening agents (OBAs), which are essentially florescent dyes that make the white color appear to glow. This is to aid in maintaing the visual impression of whiteness. Many mainstream detergents also add a small amount of OBAs in an attempt to prolong the effect. If you wear clothes made of treated fabric next to your skin, you acquire a subtle florescence of your own. In addition, older or antique white textiles when washed with detergents that add OBAs can become splotchy looking. On the whole, I imagine the marketing babble about maintaining your clothing's finish most likely has to do with the resin-coated anti-wrinkling factor. Those do wear away over time, and you may not have clothing treated that way. For that reason you should decide if the "finish-protection" thing is really important to you. HTH, Molly~ PS BTW, a very familiar textile finish is plain old starch added to the rinse water. For that, of course, it's probably better that it washes away with each wash or you'd be walking around like the tin man sooner or later.

Hey guys! Just wanted to let you all know you were spot on, of course. Kitchen is red oak, main floors and upstairs are white.. and naturally all patched in oak amongst the white is red. It’s so beautiful I may just do Bona NaturalSeal followed by Traffic HD. My floor guy didn’t bring any Bona products with him to test out so I’m hoping you all have some advice to offer for the red oak in the kitchen. (Planning on emailing him tonight to confirm he’s bringing NaturalSeal and Traffic HD with him tomorrow). What would be the best product to use on the red oak to try and match as closely as possible to my natural white oak? I know it won’t be perfect and that’s fine. Just hoping to give him a heads up since he only brought 5 Duraseal stains with him today and all but 1 were med-dark.