Another carpet bites the dust!

Well, it is about to bite the dust.  This weekend, we’ll be pulling up the old wall-to-wall carpet in the dining room, and it’s headed straight for the trash.  Jenny and I talked about it, and neither of us can stand it anymore.  The living room looks so much nicer without its carpet, so the one in the dining room has to go.  It also smells like cat, and we can’t get that to go away anymore, so it really has to go.  Tomorrow, I hope to get the majority of the furniture moved out of the room.  That isn’t required, but it will make life easier.  Then I’m going to cut the carpet into strips while it is still tacked to the floor–I wish that I would have done that in the other room, as it would have made that job easier overall.  After the carpet is cut into strips, I’m going to start pulling it up and bundling it into rolls (the garbage people here take anything, but they have to be able to lift it with one person, so they like things to be bundled and generally less than three feet in width).  After it is in rolls, it will be headed straight outside to wait for trash day next week. 

Then the hard part starts:  What seems like miles of tack strips need to be removed, painful nail by painful nail.  Once all of the tack strips are up and any left-over nails have been removed, it will be time to get to work on the padding.  This means lots and lots of staples, because installers hate getting called-back for padding that has moved under a floor.  Argh.  I often debate, while pulling hundreds of staples from the floor or prying dry-rotted tack strips from the floor, which one do I hate more?  The jobs are both lousy, but absolutely necessary.  When we’re done, though, we’ll hopefully have a nice floor there. 

After the tack strips and staples are up, and the bundled padding has been moved to outside, the whole floor gets a broom sweep, and shop-vac’ing where necessary.  Then it gets dust-mopped, and then it’s done–for now.  We’ll eventually sand and refinish the floors in the living room and dining room, but that will have to wait.  We’re also going to have to see if we want a floor covering in the dining room.

I’m excited to see what’s under the carpet.  I hope it’s as nice as the living room floor.  Even if it isn’t, though, we’re just going to pull it up and deal with it.  If there are any spots that need to be repaired for obvious or dangerous problems, we can handle those as we find them.  I suspect that there aren’t going to be any issues like that, so we just want it to be in decent shape overall.  Maybe I’ll find some visual clues to the type of table and chairs and other furniture that was in the room, too.  That would be awesome.  It will also be interesting to see if there is any evidence of the threshold for the door that used to lead to the former smoking porch.  That would be a neat find, too.  And hey, there’s always the hope that we’ll find that missing million dollars under the carpet, too.  🙂 

jonathan