Of Carpet and Other Things

Somewhere amidst the turkey and stuffing we managed to get work done on The Serpico House this past weekend. First off, I would like to mention that doing any kind of home renovation with Xavier in the house is kind of crazy. The boy wants to check out everything--the fireplace, the stove, the drawers, the steps--and it's all stuff that would probably kill him, so we have to ever vigilant to make sure he's not setting himself or the house on fire or breaking his bones on one thing or another. We really appreciate the folks who helped us out with him--my parents, Lacey and CJ. Without their involvement, I am pretty sure we'd be even crazier than we are now. Thanks, guys.

Xavier is the foreman on the Serpico job--"Hey, time is money. Bear hats ain't cheap."

Bypassing the nicey-nice things like yummy thanksgiving leftovers with my parents and figuring out the gas fireplace (light the pilot... and it works!) , let's talk about the floors. You've seen the nasty-ass, stinky carpet in previous posts. Let me tell you what happened...

Remember the carpeted bathroom with the gray-and-pink tile? Well, thankfully, that carpet came up easily--one strong pull, and here's what we have....

Pink is SO not my color.

Yeah. More pink and gray. Not my first choice, but, luckily for us, it's in nice shape, and there's only one area with adhesive remainders near the door. We're thinking a little Goo Gone will do the trick on that stuff. The floor itself is honestly not bad. We'll need to do some caulking around the tub and walls, but otherwise it'll be fine until we can afford to do a full-on gut and renovation. We will, however, get rid of the curtains. A man can only abide so much pink.

The first big room we tackled was Xavier's room. It had the icky green shag-style carpet. Nasty. Here's what we found when we started pulling up that crap...

This padding stuff looks like really old pizza,.

Yes! We were pretty excited to see a nice floor under there. We think it's oak. Or something. Whatever. It's nice and in good shape. Oh yeah, check this out...

Yep. The carpet padding still bore its Sharpie marker tattoo. And, ew... it was rotten. As was the carpet. We made a rookie error when removing the carpet, though--we just pulled it up and yanked it into the hallway. That's not the preferred method of the pros, and I blame myself for being over-excited about the whole thing. Hell, I didn't even wear gloves while tearing it out. (That was dumb, too. I'm pretty sure I don't want tetanus.)

What we were supposed to do was pull up the carpet and slice it into 3x6' chunks and roll them up with tape. Makes things a lot smoother for clean-up. That's not what we did. We made a mess.

Instead, what we had in the hallway looked a lot more like Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock.

I guess you can see the family resemblance, huh? 

That wasn't fun to clean up, but we managed. 

The tack strip in Xavier's room was newish (maybe 10 years old?), which meant it was hearty. In other words, it put up a fight, as did the many, many staples we encountered under the padding. Pliers, putty knives and pry-bars to the rescue! After some prying and sweeping, I think we wound up with something pretty nice...


Not bad at all, I thinks. But are you noticing something around the edges of the baseboards? Yeah, we noticed it, too. This....
Funky-ass gap, huh? I guess it's something like an expansion gap that the builders figured nobody would ever see, since we believe these floors have never been without carpet. Yep. So... it looks like we have a date with some quarter-round molding and a miter box. Yay. I'm guessing this will be the case in every room, since we encountered the same concern in the upstairs hallway, too.

Extra nastiness--the padding in the hallway had become so dead and worn that it was more like sand than padding. We expect most of the older carpet will have this kind of padding, which also explains the musty smell.



Gross, right? It's like sand under a spider-web-like membrane. On the plus side, all we have to do is sweep it up after pulling up the carpet, so, even though it's pretty disgusting, at least it doesn't have to be rolled up.

The tack strip in the hallway was a lot easier to pull up--we were getting foot-long hunks of tack strip out of the floor in the hallway, which is a big step up from the four-inch hunks we got out of the bedroom.

Seeing the hallway like this made me feel pretty good.
I'm sure Ms. Serpico would have been horrified at the wood floor, but I can't help that. We may call it The Serpico House, but it's becoming our house.

Now we just have about 1,500 square feet left to do...