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.