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!

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...

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.

Uppa Da Stairs.

I promised I'd show the upstairs of The Serpico House today, and I am as good as my word.

Let's have a look...
That'd be my dad pointing at the fold-up steps to the attic. This room will be Xavier's chill spot. Icky green carpet. Meh. It's gonna go. It's a nice room otherwise, though. Once the carpet is out, I think a coat of paint will do the trick on this one.

The attic is actually a good size (I walked up the steps and checked it out.) Apparently some of the other home-owners in the area have finished theirs and added a real staircase, which creates a very usable third-floor room. I do like this idea, but that can happen at some point down the road. As of right now, I think it's just going to be a hatch-thingy in the ceiling of Xavier's room. We'll have to figure something out with it before he becomes a teenager, though. Otherwise, you can bet it will become a den of illicit things very quickly.


Across the hall from Xavier's room is the office.


It's nice-sized room, for sure, and we're thinking this will be the place where we keep Avy's sewing stuff, the computer doo-dads and some of my guitar/music things. We also want to put a bed/futon in there for possible guests. Once again, the nasty carpet must go. A little paint n' spackle, and I think it'll be groovy. The window off to the right is a door leading to sort of deck thing. It's kind of odd--it leads to this hunk of flat roof above the kitchen. There's no decking on the roof, and there are no railings around it, either, so I don't know why the door is there, but all of the houses in the area have these things.

Possible uses for this extra space:

1. A deck. Duh. We could put some decking and a railing up there, and we'd have a nice little spot to watch the birds in the morning. Not a horrible idea.
   
2. Make the office into a master suite by building the deck area into a big-ass, baller bathroom. One of the back walls butts up to the back wall of the present second-floor bathroom, so this is a good possibility.
   
3. Nothing. Just keep it clean of leaves and make sure it's all painted up with roof paint and leave it alone.

We're going with the third option for now.

OK, so... on to our bedroom...Here we have the big bedroom. We plan to use this one. It's really a good size. The pink carpet is... um... not staying, and I am not sure why there's a chair rail all the way around the room, but... hey, it's a big bedroom with a two big closets. Xavier really liked the closets. A little paint, and I think we'll be good to go. I kind of hope they leave the bed. I think we could sell that sucker on Craigslist for a pretty penny. That's paint money, kids.

And now, another horror show. The bathroom.

Yep. Pink and grey. And carpeted. I guess it's not horrible, but Xavier doesn't look too excited about it. We want to do a total gut on this, but that might not be feasible any time soon, so I think we'll start with paint and getting rid of the damn carpet.

There's also a pretty horrid, cracked chandelier in the upstairs hallway--it makes the hallway glow red like it's a whorehouse in Amsterdam. That'll have to go, too. There's also a mystery light switch in the hallway with tape on it and a little note to "leave this on." Being the jerk I am, I turned it off to see what happened. Turns out it opens a portal to Narnia. Mr. Tumnus says hi. Actually, nothing happened as far as I could tell. That kind of thing can't stand in my home. Switches should have some kind of function or be banished to the great rift.

I see some wiring work in my future with this thing.


I'll show you the finished basement on Monday.