Why do bad floors happen to good houses?

I’m such a rookie. I forgot to bring the camera for day 1! First house. Cut me some slack. Luckily, we live in the future and have phones with cameras in them. Unfortunately for me, I forgot all about them until the guest bedroom looked like this:

I know. I know. I was supposed to photograph the entire house before we touched anything. What can I say? We were way too excited to say goodbye to the ugly blue carpet. I’ll save the house tour photos for a day when I have a real camera.

Can you say ’90s? And what’s with the stains? ….is that mustard??

The guest bedroom is pretty massive. It’s also in the most finished of all the rooms — someone redid the walls and insulated it properly. We were originally planning on quickly fixing up this room and using it as our crash pad while we remodel the master bedroom. But while we were in there today, we decided to tear down the wall to the closet and make a big, open, custom cabinet instead. And we decided to seal off the door. And tear a big hole in another wall to install French doors. We’re estimating 3 weekends and a whole lot of whining until we can finally move in.

Anyway, once we dragged the carpet out to the garage — holy crap, it feels so good to have a garage where we can dump things we don’t want to see!! — this is what the floor looked like:

Surprise! There’s a big ol’ chunk of floor missing! I took a picture with my boots in full view. I don’t have dainty little lady feet, so this should give you a pretty good idea about how depressed we were about our find:

This would have been a relatively easy fix for Bradley, but the rest of the floors bummed us out even more. They’re not hardwood floors, they’re more like softwood floor. They’re pine, and they’re super flakey and super soft. This is the same floor we’ve had in two apartments in Brooklyn, and even though this stuff is in way better condition, it still blows.

We were planning on refinishing some beautiful old hardwood floors, but it looks like we’ll be putting in new hardwood floors instead. We want to finish with all the demolition, sheet rocking, plastering and painting before we get to the flooring, though. We might be living with crusty floors for a couple of months. Bew hew!

Outside the guest bedroom is a long hallway that was covered in horrible burgundy carpet. I didn’t get a before picture, but I snagged one of the staircase:

And here’s what the hallway looked like naked:

Someone painted the floor chocolatey brown. And then spilled white paint all over it. And then covered it with burgundy carpet. Whhhhhhhy? I should also note that I craved chocolate the entire time I pulled floor tacks in this chocolately hallway.

You can see our bathroom way back there. It’s in good shape so it’s pretty low on our list of fix-its. Thank. Goodness.

I spent the better part of my day finding little tufts of carpet pad that still clung to the floor:

Clearing off the fuzz:

Yanking out the staple:

Repeat a bajillion times until the floors are totally clear of carpet tacks and staples. I did this for hours. It was totally brainless work, and it was actually kind of like yoga for a while. Yankin’ staples, listenin’ to the rain, fixin’ up our house. Droppin’ g’s from words cuz we’re livin’ in the country now. That’s how we roll.

I cleared out the hallway, guest bedroom and the Smurf room which will eventually be my office:

The Smurf room featured blue walls, blue ceilings and blue carpet. And not tones of different blues or anything. It was all the exact same blue. So. Weird. We weren’t expecting much when we peeked under the carpet, but instead we found this:

These are the best floors we’ve uncovered so far. (Don’t pity us. We signed up for a fixer upper and we deserve this.) The Smurf room is a later addition to the house, and the floors are totally different from the rest of the house. We can totally sand and stain these and save about $500 in hardwood flooring costs! Whoo hoo! We did a little happy dance and thanked the flooring gods before getting back on our hands and knees to yank out staples.

And by “we” I mean “me.” Bradley spent most of the day installing new deadbolts, because even though skeleton keys are super cute, we’re not sure they do much to keep burglars out. Here he is on the back porch, which is currently a hot mess:

See that half-a**ed trellis back there? That thing is going down. With sledgehammers. And we will laugh maniacally while we rip it up. Also, please note the carpet that will eventually need to be ripped up. *Single tear*

Um, we have to redo all the doors as well. They need a serious sanding and re-painting. Don’t judge. This house is old. And some people can live with crusty paint and burgundy carpet and Smurf rooms. Anyway, the house is safe and secure now, and we can keep on renovating.

Stuff we learned this weekend:

• Be prepared for surprises.
• Always wear knee pads while doing serious flooring work. (One word: bruising.)
• Food tastes better off a grill. It just does.
• We really, really missed big trees. This one lives in our front yard:

I’ll do a full house tour with a real camera soon. Stay tuned!

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