The Legend of Ol' Painty Pants and The Wallpaper That Wouldn't Die

(Picture me as a country storyteller. Or not. This D&D-looking dude was the best thing I could find. Looks like me in a few years, right?)

*Sits back on rocking chair with a pipe*
Yup, I got a tale to tell ya... back in aught-nine... or was it the waning days of '10? My old brain gets so frazzled these days, ya know. Anyway, as I said, I have a tale to tell ya. Round these here parts, there was a woman who could paint like the wind. Went by the name of Avy. Six foot tall if she was an inch, shock of black hair sprouting from her noggin, and, by golly, could she paint... Some of the locals 'round The Old Serpico place got to callin' her 'Ol Painty Pants.

So yeah. We managed to get some painting done. Finally.

Let's start with the "oops" paint. We wanted the living room to have a warmish, sorta inviting vibe without going with too dark of a color. We had originally chosen a caramel color, but, at the last minute, we opted for a waffle color and bought two cans based on the color chip we found in Home Depot. We dropped the cans and supplies off at the house one evening last week, and Avy stopped in the next day to throw it onto the walls. She paints quickly, and she soon noticed something about the color... on the wall, it did not look like a waffle. It looked like a peach.



Now, I'm not saying it looked bad or anything, but it became obvious that this peachy color wouldn't easily mesh with our big red rug and other decor. Sadly, there was no choice but to abandon the peachy waffle action and look for something a little less fruity.

We went back to the store and came back with two cans of a darkish taupe color.

**Warning to heterosexual male readers: I mentioned "taupe" and "peach" in the same post. I'm also bound to mention "mauve" and "magenta" eventually. You may need to hunt a lion, drink brandy or get into a bar fight very shortly if you're concerned about maintaining your machismo levels. I, on the other hand, am required (by physician's orders) to offload my machismo levels on a regular basis, lest I spontaneously combust from sheer masculinity. It's my cross to bear.**

The darker color works. Check it out.


The lighting is different for this photo, so you can't see the color exactly, but take my word for it--it's better. The color is mellow and lacking in the peachy quality that made the room feel a little too much like a beach house.

Here's a little more of the living room...


As you can see, we painted into the evening. Ol' Painty Pants amped things up and really got the living room looking nice.

So, let's talk about that wall... you know, the one that had the mirror on it? The one that had the wallpaper under the mirror? That wall.




Well, after looking into things a little more deeply, I found a product called Piranha Wallpaper Remover.

Is it awesome? Kind of. I didn't buy the little kit--I bought the "wall-chewer" thing and a spray bottle of the gel wallpaper remover stuff. I already had scrapers. So, while Avy... (erm, Ol' Painty Pants) was doing her thing, I went after the wallpaper. The "wall-chewer" thing made horrible squeals when dragged across the surface of the wall (perhaps to scare away the old paste?), but it also made a lot of little holes in the wallpaper, which allowed the gel stuff to work its magic.

After a little time with the gel and a scraper, I had this...

Better, right? Yes. Better, but not all better. Some of the wallpaper was incredibly stubborn, especially in the areas where the folks who installed the giant mirror used some kind of ludicrous adhesive for the foam padding behind the mirror. Nasty. The upper parts of the wall were highly unpleasant--hurts the arms quite a bit to have them over one's head for so long. Ow.

Around this point, Avy and I ate some dinner and hit the sack... erm... air mattress. Tell you what--a nice air mattress isn't a terrible thing to own. We got a good night's sleep and picked up Kenny (Painty Pants Jr.) the next morning. With his help (and a lot more spraying and scraping), we had this...
Even better, but still not ready to paint. Nope. All those little chunks of old adhesive just didn't want to leave the house. Kenny and I attacked the wall with sponges and water, and that did the trick.


Yes! Finally, something suitable for painting. And paint we did.


Ah. Much better. After another coat, we called that wall done. Big improvement, I thinks.

But the trim... oh, the trim. This is where I get to use the word "mauve." We're re-painting all of Mrs. Serpico's mauve trim with a color called "toasted white." We think it looks pretty kick-ass against the taupe.

To use an interior design expression (and lose more machismo), the toasted white "pops" against the taupe. Wow. There's a sentence not usually uttered while butchering deer, huh?

So, onto the dining room..

OK, we decided we wanted the dining room to look very elegant and rich, so we chose a very deep burgundy color for the part of the wall above the chair rail, with the same toasted white for the lower part of the wall and the trim. The guy who made the color for me said the formula starts with magenta and then adds plain old red to the mix.

I had a little fun with the paint when we first started. It really looked like a bucket of blood when I opened the first can.

"Danny isn't here, Mrs. Serpico..."

Know what sucks about deep red paint (and red in general)? It doesn't cover well. I mean... it just doesn't cover well at all. You need a lot of coats. A lot. After two coats, we still had this...


It's still not a deep, elegant, bloody burgundy color, but it'll get there eventually. We're thinking four coats might do it. Maybe. We hope.

Until next time, Ol' Painty Pants and I bid you a fond farewell.

The Bear in the Mirror, and Big-Ass TV: The Mountening

Kooky happenings at The Serpico house lately.

The township came and took away the leaves we piled at the curb. The street is frighteningly clean. I like it. Tax dollars at work!

In other news, Avy's aunt Renee assisted in the acquisition of a big-ass TV--a 46" LG flat-screen LCD.

I know... every male person reading this just said, "oooooOOOOooo!"

We got it for a discount. Yes, Avy is a smart shopper. And the TV? It's bad-ass. Xavier already digs it for Blue's Clues and other political discussion shows. He's into current events.

We had plans to mount the TV over the fireplace. Avy scored us a nice flat-screen mount, which included all the hardware for the job. We just needed a few special tools to make the whole thing happen. And courage. Because dropping an expensive TV scares me, as does the idea of making a lot of potentially large holes in the wall.

But, before we get to that whole thing... remember that mirror in our living room?

This one...
It's over there on the left, next to my mom. Big tacky mirror. Actually, the faded Greek key thing around the edge is tacky. The rest is just a really big mirror. Anyway, we decided we didn't want it immediately. We finally got around to taking it down this weekend. The plan? Get rid of the Greek key parts (they're actually smaller mirrors bordering the big one in the center) and put the big middle part in the basement, where it will act as a visual assistant for Avy's bellydance crew's routines. Well, we managed to get the mirror down there. That was no problem.

That mirror was definitely professionally installed. The hardware holding it up was not playing around at all. We made it bend to our will, though. But guess what was under the mirror?

There was wallpaper under there. Actually, two kinds of wallpaper.




What the hell? There's no wallpaper anywhere else in the house. Figures that the one place we find it would be hidden by a giant mirror. Awesome.

So there's that funky speckled stuff on the outside... and some really old textured, velvety stuff on the inside. It's all dusty. And it's UP there. I mean, it has no desire to come down. But Ms. Serpico's mighty wallpaper will bow to us. I swear it. It has to go before we paint.

The textured blue wallpaper is kind of neat, actually. Check it out close up...

There are flowers and things in the pattern.

Anyway, cool or not, it has to go. And, like I said, it really doesn't want to come down, but wet sponges and scrapers are persuasive implements.


The key is to get the wallpaper really good and wet, and let that water soak into the paper for a while before starting the scraping process. It's almost as much fun as scraping adhesive off of the floor, except your arm starts to hurt sooner. Have you noticed the amount of scraping we've been doing in this house? It seems to be a recurring theme. I really hope we don't have to scrape anything else. We were only able to do a smallish amount of work before we had to skip out for the evening, but we did return the next day.

We did not, however, continue scraping, as we had another task we wished to complete--the mounting of the big-ass TV. We didn't have a lot of time, so we wanted to just quickly knock the job out. We thought it would be simple.

Well, it really is a simple process. There are only four major bits to the kit: the TV, two clampy things and the bracket. The bracket goes on the wall, the clampy things go on the TV and then the clampy things are used to attach to the TV to the bracket, which is on the wall... and then your TV is on the wall. Basic. I mean, yeah there are screws and other things, too, but that's the basic jist.

Maybe. But you need to have some stuff, first. Like a stud finder (**make obligatory stud joke here**) so that the big lag bolts for the bracket can go into a solid part of the wall. And a drill bit of the proper dimensions to start those bolts on their journey into the stud. And a socket wrench of the proper size in order to make the bolts turn.

Yeah, we didn't have those things, so we had to go buy them.

The other thing you have to figure out when you're mounting a big-ass TV is how you plan to center the thing on the wall. See, we wanted to mount the TV above the fireplace, which is kind of a sweet idea, really. The problem is that there is one stud in the middle of the fireplace, which would be the ideal spot to mount the bracket. Except the bracket has to be mounted onto TWO studs, which means the damn TV would then be off to one side or the other... not centered over the fireplace. No. That's not what we want. We want what we want.

So what this means is that we have to choose the side we want to mount the bracket and then slide the TV back in the other direction in order to center it. BAH. It took some doing, but we made it happen... and it does look pretty damn sweet.


Sorry--the picture isn't the best. The TV isn't quite centered in this shot, and the wires are showing, but whatever. You can see that we have a big-ass TV over our fireplace. That was the goal. We did it. Yay!

Just to give you an idea of the scale of this thing--the fireplace is 72" wide. The TV is 46". That's a big-ass TV. We may have to start watching sports or something. Isn't the World Bowl Cup coming up soon?

A thought: there are people who charge upwards of $200 to come to your house with a stud finder, a little drill and a socket wrench, and they install your TV on a wall mount in about 20 minutes. Now, granted, we had to buy a stud finder (which we'll need in other projects) a drill bit (um, duh) and a cheap set of socket wrenches (again, we'll need those, too) , and it did take us more than 20 minutes. I think the tools cost us about $60. So we saved approximately $140 by figuring this out on our own. And, now that we've done it once, I know we can do it again, which is good, because we want to mount a TV in our bedroom, too. No sense having the thing sit on a dresser or something if it can be mounted, right?

Raking, Blowing and Scraping.

One of the nice things Ms. Serpico did with the house was keep the yard really clean and neat. Of course, she was also a retired lady with a lot of time on her hands. That ain't us.

It's hard to believe we first looked at the house when the weather was still really warm--back in late September. This was the yard back then...

See that big-ass tree on the front lawn? Yeah, well... all of those leaves made a bee-line for the lawn when Autumn descended. I mean, it's nice to have a big front yard, but when my neighborly responsibilities involve clearing that yard of those extraneous leaves, I suddenly gain a hankering for the concrete jungle, where such suburbanite activities are virtually unknown.

Luckily, our truly ludicrous taxes pay for such niceties as block-by-block leaf removal. Yep. We don't even have to bag the leaves. All we have to do it get them onto the street in front of our house. Of course, the entire yard was covered with leaves by the time we took possession of the house back in late November, and we, being condo dwellers with a tiny yard, didn't own a rake at that time. And we figured it would be more important to work on the living portion of the house before we started messing with the yard, so we started on the projects you've seen in previous posts.

But the yard, dammit... the yard just wouldn't clean itself up. And the final leaf removal date loomed closer and closer... until it was almost upon us. It's this coming Wednesday, actually. So we had to deal with the yard. On the plus side, we were gifted with a nice leaf-blower (as I think I mentioned before), so I thought this whole thing would be a snap. Yeah, not so much. See, it rained on our leaves. The leaf blower is pretty powerful, but it's not powerful enough to move huge amounts of heavy, wet leaves without a lot of coaxing, and the driveway was very full of the aforementioned wet leaves.

So, while Avy and her dance-class ladies shook their booties in the basement, I took to the driveway with my little leaf-blower and got to work. I was out there for about two hours, and I swear it seemed like I didn't do anything but sort of move the leaves around a little bit. Part of the problem involved the wetness of the leaves, but the other part involved my attempts to keep from blowing leaves into my neighbor's clean yard and driveway. In the process of being a respectful neighbor, I really made things a lot more difficult for myself.

It was also dark and cold. I decided to let it go until Sunday, when Avy and I could work together.

Venturing into the living room and surveying the state of things, I knew we needed to work on the floors some more. Remember this crap?

Yeah. Most of the floor looked OK, but there was plenty of this action going on around the room. Plus staples. Lots of staples. The staples are annoying, but the dessicated, mummified, glued-on padding goo crap... that shit... man. After attacking this stuff with plastic scrapers and a scrub brush, it really didn't want to come up. I decided to carefully--very carefully--go after these eyesore areas with the dull edge of a box-cutter/carpet-cutter thingy.

That is some tedious work--scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape... brush... scrape, scrape, scrape... brush... sweep. Repeat. The good news is that it works really well. Here's the same area after the razor treatment...

Avy and I worked the razors while Angel (bless her heart!) crawled around, pulling up staples. That shit took hours. And I will admit to being somewhat obsessive/compulsive about this kind of thing--I really didn't want to stop until it was done. Of course, we did stop for dinner, which, by the way, came from the little Chinese take-out joint about four blocks away... and it was really pretty yummy. Good portions, no skimping on the good stuff, either. They gave us so much that we had leftovers!

I continued to work on the floors while Avy and Angel pulled down the chair rail in the living room and spackled over Ms. Serpico's many, many picture nail holes. The woman liked pictures, and she wasn't shy about using nails to put those pictures up on the walls of her home. Holy crap. So many nails.

Meanwhile, you could find me, crouched on the floor like some kind of floor-scraping version of Gollum--"The hardwoodses! They're precious!" In the end, we had this...

Now, I don't know if impresses you, but check it out--here's how it looked before we scraped...


Big, big difference. You can't see the five gazillion staples that were removed, but trust me, there were an assload. The floor is now safe for general use--you can walk around in socks and not worry about getting snagged on a nail or picking up nasty yellow dust/mummified carpet padding schmeg. Good stuff. My spine was crying, but the floor looks good.

On Sunday, we spent the day working on the front yard. Rakes came into play. The yard is now free of leaves, and we are now in the good graces of our neighbors. This shot was taken from the leaf pile. See that bare tree? Also, I am hoping our yard will turn green again later. The brown part makes it look like a giant dog used the lawn as a urinal.

Check the pile....

I think every single leaf from our tree landed in our yard and just stayed there. Sheesh. Now it's all in the street, awaiting removal by the township. Ah, suburbia.

Pronging It Up

When we first looked at The Serpico House, it didn't occur to me to pay attention to the power outlets around the house. Why not? Well, I guess I was just too busy taking everything in, wandering around and trying to keep Xavier from getting into everything.

So, after messing around in the house for a while, something has become very clear: every electrical outlet in the house is a two-pronger.

Like this.

But that's not what we want. Nope. We want three-prong outlets--our dumb electronic gizmos demand three-prong action... or a little plastic thingy to convert them to two-prongs.

Yeah. I guess it's OK to have a couple of these things in your house, but nobody wants to have to use them every outlet.

So we're going to have to upgrade.

This should be fun. Neither of us knows much about handling electricity, but we do know that we don't want to touch any live wires. Duh. Having said this much, after reading a bit and watching videos of the process, I feel like we should be able to do it ourselves.... but I'd be a big, fat liar if I told you I wasn't a little bit scared to try.

Powder, Ghost Turds and Scrapers.

When I last hollered at you guys, we'd finished removing carpet, tack strip and staples from the bathroom, Xavier's room and the second-floor hallway. Avy and CJ got into the office and master bedroom while I was at work, and they ripped up the carpets. Nothing major to discuss about those. In fact, I don't even have pictures of the office. Oops.

The carpet was, as previously described, stinky and nasty. In Xavier's room, the carpet padding was relatively solid. Nasty, but solid. The rest of the rooms had that foul gossamer spider web/ghost turd membrane over decayed sand/powder padding stuff under the carpets. It smelled as bad as the carpet... just in powder form. Powdered funk. Ick.

Makes you wanna yell out, "The world is MINE!" and then take a big whiff, right?

So yeah, that's what were were seeing under the carpets. Not so pleasant, but a broom and dustpan did the job. Actually, I really should have gotten video of it, but, in order to break up the dessicated padding, we found that a modified Twist or Watusi dance step was highly effective as a padding loosening technique. You will just have to imagine the scene, OK? It was a little ridiculous.

When I arrived at The Serpico House on Friday, my living room and dining room were full folks--my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, her son, my son... Kind of nice to come home to a full house, actually!

My bro-in-law, Kenny, and Avy were up in the bedroom, pulling up tack strip. They'd taken care of the carpet on the steps, too. Progress! Of course, another never-ending project involved making a dent in the removal of the five bazillion carpet staples anchored in the floor. I am starting to think that the carpet installers were paid by the staple.

Kenny is a great helper--what he lacks in experience, he makes up for with willingness to learn, a positive attitude and plain old youthful exuberance. Basically, he's a great kid who just wants to help out, and he doesn't get tired. Once he learned how to remove tack strip, he knocked out the rest of the room while I gave him pointers. I know it sounds like I was being lazy, and I'm not gonna lie... I was tired as hell after a full day of work, and Kenny was a very willing student. So, yeah. I was lazy. I let Ken do the hard stuff.

Avy and I eventually sent everyone on their way, and, with Xavier safely ensconced at my mother-in-law's place, we decided to take a little time for ourselves and test out a nearby Korean barbecue restaurant. After a spicy meal, we conked out in a pile of blankets on that nasty living room floor. I was so tired that the smell of the floor didn't keep me awake.

Sleeping on the floor is um... not so grate, akshully. On the plus side, the discomfort made us wake up early, which was good. We managed to finish up in the office and our bedroom.

Here's the bedroom, post carpet and tack strip removal.

It appears that, at some point, there was an area rug on the floor in this room, which is apparent from the darker area around the perimeter. I suppose this color disparity might bother some folks, but not me. I think it's kind of cool, really. I don't need the floor to look like it's brand new--I just want nice, clean, unstinky hardwoods. You can also see the sheer hugeness of the room. The bedroom is about the same size as the living room. Crazy, right?

So let's talk about carpet staples now. I can't begin to tell you how many damn staples were in the floor and steps. Making a repeat appearance, my man Kenny and I spent much of Saturday morning pulling staples and tufts of carpet out of these steps during Avy's dance class. The end result was worth the effort.


Kenny and I moved on and started work on the dining room. The actual removal wasn't bad. I got Kenny his own razor knife thing--the kind with the metal handle and the non-retractable blade. That carpet was predictably gross, as was the padding underneath. On this excursion, we were lucky enough to have a shop vac at our disposal. Awesome--a super-powerful vacuum with a giant bucket of capacity. I swept, Kenny ran the vac. We eventually got enough of the "padding cocaine" off of the floor, and we started in on the tack strip and staple removal with the help of Avy (who was done with class) and Angel, one of her classmates (and a good friend.)

The dining room was the first place where we encountered real problems with the padding. Apparently, since it was a dining room, there were occasional food/beverage spills, and these spills did not mesh well with the mummy-like consistency of the carpet padding. In short, some of these spills went right through the carpet and into the padding, which, in turn, became something like a cement. The areas where the padding had been wet were just kind of stuck to the floor. Attacking these areas was not pleasant or particularly fun, but we went after them with plastic scrapers in order to avoid damaging the floor, and I eventually tried chipping away at them with the razors, too. By the time we were finished, I think it looked pretty sweet. Check it out...
Is it perfect? No. It's not a perfect hardwood floor, but that's OK. It's free of stinky carpet and padding, and it's clean. We are fairly confident that a nice scrubbing will take care of any egregious stains.

By the time we had finished with the dining room, we were slap-happy and exhausted, so we returned to our condo to sleep.

Kenny was ready to rock bright and early, so we decided to tackle the living room floor, which, by the way, was the last room to need the carpet removed. I'm not messing with carpets again until we re-do our kitchen.

This time, I had the presence of mind to take pictures during the process.

What you're seeing in the above shot is a nice wood floor covered with hunks of dried-out carpet padding and "ghost turds"--that gauzy, spider-web-like crap on top of the padding.

And this one, just above? This is what it looks like right after the carpet comes up. I guess the white gauzy stuff is kind of like the skin on a nice brie cheese, except the obvious difference here is that the stuff under the skin is yellowish, stinky and sandy. Brie isn't sandy.

Sadly, there were more of those damn "cement" spots in the living room--yet another reason to keep your snacks and drinks off out of carpeted rooms. Or just don't put down carpet. Or have the padding changed from time to time. The padding "cement" areas start out like this...


After a little scraping, it gets better...

We'll go after them with a little vinegar, water and a scrub brush. I think that'll knock them out.

We got rid of the tack strip--Avy has major tack strip removal skills!--but we still have plenty of &*(^%^&&** staples to remove. The number of staples in the floor can not be exaggerated. I think we have two small trash cans halfway full of nothing but staples. We could melt them down and make a chain-link fence or something.

Anyway, this is how we left the living room on Sunday...

Again, not perfect, but we're working on it. Things are coming along.

Thinking positively, we're almost ready to paint!

Leaves, Gutters and You.

Yesterday, Avy worked on the house by herself for a while, since I was at work. She tore up some more carpet and whatnot. The place is looking better by the minute, and that funky smell is slowly but surely disappearing--thank god.

Funnily enough, Avy says the smell didn't seem too bad to her until she started working on the floors by herself. She says it hit her kind of suddenly when she pulled up a chunk of carpet in the bedroom.

But never mind that... let's talk about leaves, shall we?

This new neighborhood is full of trees, which is really quite lovely, especially in the fall/winter, with the leaves changing colors and falling, etc. But you know what's not so great about leaves? They fall on your house and wind up in your rain gutters, especially if your house is old-school, like The Serpico House. Long story short, I snuck a peek at the gutters over the weekend, and I was not pleased. The gutters are in fine shape, actually, but they're full of leaves. This is bad.

Leaves are the enemies of gutters--they clog them up and cause water to go places we don't want it to go... like into the house or the foundation of the house. Not good. I was able to sort of quickly push the leaves out of one gutter over the weekend, but most of the roof isn't too accessible without a ladder (and I ain't got one yet), so I had to accept the fact that I will not be able to to clear the gutters completely for a while. It sucks, but I have to think that if the gutters were OK thus far, they will be OK for a while longer.

I'm thinking it would be pretty sweet to upgrade our gutters to these bad boys...

I don't know what these things cost, but I'm gonna guess it's expensive--whenever they don't list the price online, you know it's not cheap. Damned if this doesn't look like a really good idea, though, but I'm going to ignore this option for a while. I can clean gutters until I can afford to add the snazzy, self-cleaning kind.

I really don't like the idea of climbing around on the roof, pawing leaves out of the gutters, but it's obviously not beyond the realm of my abilities. It's obviously not a complex activity, but it's not pleasant. And paying someone to do it? Well, I don't mind paying for a valuable service, but I also don't have money for that kind of stuff.

Of course, there are other options. Like this thing, for example.

Seems pretty straight-forward, right? We just received a lovely leaf-blower as a gift from my folks (they no longer have a yard since they live in a high-rise condo now), so all I need to get would be the additional kit in order to make this happen, and then I could stand on the ground to do this. I like that idea. No ladders. Yes.

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...