On the Cusp of Fighting Alligators

This is it, peeps--tomorrow the papers will be signed, and we'll finally be allowed to enter The Serpico House and start working on it. I mean, yes, there will be a bunch of this-and-that and what-have-you before we're actually living in the house, but tomorrow will be the day it really begins.

So what do we want to do right away?

We've decided to address the floors first. Why the floors? Well, to put it bluntly, the carpets in there are funky... and not in a cool, James Brown kind of way. It's not that they're dirty, really, so much as they're just kind of awful. Thankfully, it doesn't appear that Ms. Serpico owned a dog or a cat, so the carpets aren't terribly stained or repugnant and stinky, but they do smell kind of stale and old, and they've got sort of paths worn into them. I would guess most of the carpet is at least 25 years old, and the newer stuff is less than five years old. We want it all gone. We're fairly positive there is nice hardwood under most of the carpet, and we're also pretty sure most of it has never seen the light of day. Wall-to-wall carpet was apparently the way to go for most people until fairly recently. Of course, these days we know it's just a major pain in the ass--it's annoying to keep it clean, it collects and attracts dust and other allergens and just plain gets worn out.

With any luck, we will hopefully find old tile under the carpet in the bathrooms... and possibly linoleum under the carpet in the kitchen. We can hope, right?

Of course, the big downside to removing all the carpet in a wall-to-wall carpeted house is this nasty stuff...

Tack strip. You know what it is, right? This is what the carpet-layers nail into the floor around the perimeter of your rooms and use to make the carpet stick to the floor. Awful stuff, really, and no fun to remove from a wood floor, either. One of my former homes had a huge first floor completely covered in awful, ancient blue wall-to-wall carpet. I pulled that crap up the first day we took possession of the house, and it fought me the entire time. But the removal of the carpet wasn't the worst part of that endeavor... nope. The worst part involved pulling all of the little carpet staples out of the middle of the floor (the installers were quite thorough) and ripping out those damn tack strips.

That process was brutal--sitting on the floor, inching along with a flat-head screwdriver, a set of metal pliers, a rag and a small trash can. It went like this: wrap the end of the screwdriver with the rag (to keep from marring the floor), coax it under the edge of the tack strip until it starts to come up, emit cries of frustration and pain after impaling fingers on those tiny metal tack-strip teeth, grab end of tack strip with pliers, pull up tack strip, more cries of frustration as tack strip snaps in half, leaving big-ass nails still embedded in floor, grab nail with pliers, pull nail like a maniac, remove nail, throw in trash, curse at floor, inch along... repeat. It sucked, let me tell you.

I finally got it all done, and it was really not fun at all. Humorously enough, at the time I was sure I had been handling the tack strip removal incorrectly and just got lucky by not ruining my floor--there's got to be a better way, right? Nope. Turns out almost every DIY outlet recommends the method I described. Wow. We can put a man on the moon and invent a thing to stick in your car that literally tells you how to get from place to place, but we can't come up with a better way to get this nasty stuff off of the floor? Come on, scientists--get to work on something useful, willya?

And, naturally, we will have to bust our humps to get this stuff up quickly, because once the carpets are up, leaving the tack strip on the floor is like letting little tetanus-bearing alligators live in every room of your house. And, with Xavier being the kind of kid he is, you can bet he'd find a way to face-plant directly into this stuff. So it's gotta go right after the carpets bite the dust.