from grimy to beautiful?
Originally we were just going to pay Home Depot to take out our old (grimy, dark purple) carpet and replace it with something new. But then they told us that they wouldn't install over wood floors, and we happened to have the original-to-our-house parquet hiding the carpet. We knew the parquet was not salvageable (it had sustained damage from both water and termites over the years) so we decided to rip everything out and then replace with some sort of yet-to-be determined flooring.
So the last few weekends (for me)/weeks (for everyone else) have been consumed by:
(1) ripping up carpet and cutting into strips of the appropriate size for our city's on-call extra pickup;
(2) removing carpet pad and tack strips;
(3) removing parquet flooring;
(4) scraping excess adhesive off the concrete slab.
The latter job is MESSY--flakes of dried (black, shiny) adhesive got EVERYWHERE and the house filled up with fine black dust. You could start the day spotlessly clean, but within an hour your body and clothes would be coated in black grime. The black grime also got onto our beautiful, almost-new kitchen floor, the bathroom tile, and the bathtub. The walls have black smudges on them. Everywhere. And the kids were black from head to toe.
Finally, today, we finished the last of the flooring job. The rooms we're working on have been swept and mopped and are ready for permanent flooring. (Some rooms have the old carpet back in place temporarily, until we can install the new stuff, since we don't want to live on concrete for weeks.) The boys have all showered. Lemuel is scrubbing the kitchen floor--thankfully, it looks like everything will all come off.
We have 20 cases of laminate sitting in the living room, waiting for installation there and in the hallway--tomorrow's job. We have a beautiful variegated (cream/tan/green) berber carpet rolled out in the family room but not yet tacked down at the edges. This will be installed next weekend, along with a more normal brownish plush carpet (yet to be purchased) in the bedrooms.
I will be glad to be rid of the purple. The only thing it was good for was hiding dirt tracked in by little boys.
So the last few weekends (for me)/weeks (for everyone else) have been consumed by:
(1) ripping up carpet and cutting into strips of the appropriate size for our city's on-call extra pickup;
(2) removing carpet pad and tack strips;
(3) removing parquet flooring;
(4) scraping excess adhesive off the concrete slab.
The latter job is MESSY--flakes of dried (black, shiny) adhesive got EVERYWHERE and the house filled up with fine black dust. You could start the day spotlessly clean, but within an hour your body and clothes would be coated in black grime. The black grime also got onto our beautiful, almost-new kitchen floor, the bathroom tile, and the bathtub. The walls have black smudges on them. Everywhere. And the kids were black from head to toe.
Finally, today, we finished the last of the flooring job. The rooms we're working on have been swept and mopped and are ready for permanent flooring. (Some rooms have the old carpet back in place temporarily, until we can install the new stuff, since we don't want to live on concrete for weeks.) The boys have all showered. Lemuel is scrubbing the kitchen floor--thankfully, it looks like everything will all come off.
We have 20 cases of laminate sitting in the living room, waiting for installation there and in the hallway--tomorrow's job. We have a beautiful variegated (cream/tan/green) berber carpet rolled out in the family room but not yet tacked down at the edges. This will be installed next weekend, along with a more normal brownish plush carpet (yet to be purchased) in the bedrooms.
I will be glad to be rid of the purple. The only thing it was good for was hiding dirt tracked in by little boys.