Carpet Diem

The last time we really talked about our living room was way back in August 2011. It’s gone through a lot of changes since then:

• The living room was our makeshift bedroom until we could get the guest bedroom and office renovated.
• After we moved upstairs, the living room became a storage room. We closed the door and pretended the mess didn’t exist.
• Then we started construction on our dining room — which was being used as a makeshift living room — so we cleared out the living room and moved the couch & TV in there. That’s how it’s been for a few months ago.

Despite going through a lot of functional changes, the living room looks exactly the same as it did on the day we moved in. We’ve been trying to stick to our one-room-at-a-time rule so we don’t have construction messes all over the place, so up until Saturday morning this is how the living room looked:

Burgundy carpet. We’ve lived with this for 15 months, people. And we’ve survived to tell the tale.

This room and the adjoining hallway are the last two burgundy carpet strongholds, and we decided Saturday would be a good day to attack them. We’ve ripped out so much hideous carpet in this house that we’re basically experts. In fact, Bradley moves so fast when ripping that I can’t even get a decent photograph. Check it:

Step one: use a boxcutter to cut through the carpet from one end of the room to the other.

Step two: peek underneath carpet and gag.

Step three: cut along the wall if necessary (sometimes carpet is under the floor trim).

Step four: yank.

Step five: roll.

Step six: keep rolling while holding breath so as not to gag from the smell that comes up from underneath the carpet. (Kind of a mix of the subway, grandma’s attic and sour milk.)

Step seven: play Guess the Stain™ — fun for the whole family!

After that, it’s just a matter of rolling up the foam pad that sits under the carpet and yanking out 10 billion staples. While I yanked staples, Bradley removed the linoleum tiles from the main entrance.

Linoleum is typically glued to a baseboard which is either stapled or glued (or sometimes both) to the wood floor. We were really, really hoping for no glue. Glue would mean an increased risk of damaging the floors underneath and a lot more effort when we have to sand.

It definitely felt glued down. There was a lot of prying, groaning, cursing and more prying. And finally the baseboard came up enough for us to peek underneath:

The good news: no glue!
The bad news: someone went way overboard with the stapler. There were at least — and we’re not exaggerating at all here — a bajillion staples holding the baseboard to the floor. It took a solid hour to pry just that little bit up, and we had to break for lunch in the middle because it was so exhausting.

Here’s how it looked after I yanked the staples out:

Still ugly. But at least the nasty-meets-grimy combination of burgundy carpet and cheap linoleum is outta there!

The floors need to be sanded and painted, but we won’t get around to that until we’ve completely renovated the dining room, living room and hallway. This is what we’re going to live with for a while:

We’re OK with that. The floors were painted chocolate brown at some point, so we’re not worried about splinters or anything. And cool wood feels so much better under our bare feet than carpet.

There is one last remnant of burgundy carpet that we haven’t removed yet:

This is, by far, the biggest radiator we have ever seen. It’s super wide and super heavy. We will eventually have to move it to get the carpet out, but we’re not really sure how we’ll do it. We have two plans so far:

1. Make 7 or 8 beefcake friends at the gym and conning them into helping us.
2. Leave the carpet and just build a radiator box to cover the whole damn thing.

For now, we’re just happy to see (nearly all of) the carpet gone.

When we moved into the house in April 2011, we were heartbroken to find soft pine floors under the carpet. Now, we love them and can’t imagine covering them up with new hardwood floors.

There’s something really warm and comforting about rustic, beat-up, old flooring. It feels cozy. And even more important, it feels right for our 130-year-old house.

We have more updates coming up, including a 101 on making frames. Stay tuned!

Post-Demo Dining Room

Know what our favorite part of demolition is? The part where we get to show you guys this:

Ta-da! Our brick wall! And our rafters:

It’s pasty looking because we still have some dust that’s hanging on for dear life. We’re talking stage 5 clingers. We had the same problem upstairs, but it was easily fixed: we simultaneously brushed and vacuumed the wall using our shop vac’s brush attachment.

We also have to vacubrush the rafters and tidy up the wiring. Not that we don’t love 100-year-old cobwebs or anything, but creepy really isn’t the look we’re going for.

Still, we think it already looks a bajillion times better than before.

Here’s a better shot of the header. It’s a big hand-hued beam with axe marks still visible:

Some of the brick around the chimney hole isn’t looking so hot:

Our chimney guy’s going to repair that when he installs the chimney liner. We didn’t know until he dropped by to clean our chimney, but he already added brick pointing into his (super reasonably priced) estimate.

We have some floor repair to do, too:

That hole is where an outlet used to be. Right now it’s a straight drop into the basement.

One thing we’re really not looking forward to:

Each of those fuzzy tufts is a staple. Every time we had a staple-plucking day, we end up with a case of the claw hands. Better get the Advil ready — we have approximately 7.2 trillion staples to pull in this room alone.

Check out our fancy new window:

Pretty sure our neighbors hate us and rue the day we moved in, our unwieldy jackhammer in tow.

The rest of the room still looks like it was beaten with an ugly stick, but we’ll get to it soon enough. We’re not demolishing the remaining walls — just building out new walls right onto them, the way we did in the hallway upstairs. So this is rock bottom and it’s only going to get better from here. Unless it gets worse. It’s a DIY home renovation, peeps; everything is 2 steps forward, 1 step back. We roll with it.

We can’t walk into the room without making googly eyes at our brick-and-rafter combo. And if it makes us this giddy in its unpolished state, imagine how we’ll be when we get the room cleaned up, insulated and painted. Every day will be a staring contest with the wall from 8am to 10pm and then we’ll go to bed. We may never get anything accomplished ever again.

Smash’em Bash’em Sunday

Guess what? We’ve been demolishing things! Whee! Enough with all the sanding and painting and fixing — we woke up Sunday morning wanting to destroy something. So we did.

We started by removing every bit of furniture from the dining room. Not an easy task because it was serving as both the living room and my office. And storage for IKEA goods we’d purchased for the guest bedroom. Annnnd we usually ate dinner on the couch, so it was still functioning as a living room at the same time.

After the room was empty, we took our official before shots:

That’s the doorway that leads to the kitchen. The hole in the wall is a recent addition.

We’re having an old-school wood-burning fireplace installed this weekend, and that hole is where it will connect to the chimney. Our chimney guy told us we’d be better off demolishing the room before the fireplace is put in. The thing is pretty massive and it’ll be hard to work around. Plus we don’t want to risk damaging the chimney or the fireplace.

Soak it all in, peeps. The burgundy carpet. The seafoam green crown molding. The ceiling tiles. That fan. It’s all got to go.

One of the walls features a window waaaaay over on one corner. Another window to balance it out would have been nice. But we’re working with what we’ve got.

There are 3 doors on another wall:

From L to R: the basement door, the door that leads to the front of the house (and upstairs), and the living room door.

And then there’s the window wall:

The door in the middle leads out to the porch and back yard. When we viewed the house before deciding to buy it, we didn’t see any of the crusty features of the house.

It’s like we had blinders on and could only see the cool features, like the 130-year-old solid wood doors, with their skeleton keys:

Still totally charmed by those! Not so charmed by stuff like this:

We’re not really sure what happened in this corner but the molding and the floral border doesn’t line up. At all. And, in case you didn’t notice, it’s hideous. That molding, by the way, is not original. It’s a later addition, and it’s painted the most atrocious shade of grandma green. At least it matches the floral border though, right? Right?? (We’ve been dreaming of ripping it out and smashing it to bits with a sledgehammer.)

Then there’s the ceiling:

We’re not huge fans of fans, but we do plan on having 3 ceilings fans in the house (in the dining room, guest bedroom and master bedroom). We’ll need them to help circulate heat from the fireplace and to keep us cool in the summer. We decided to not have air conditioners in the house. Even when it’s 90 degrees outside, our house stays pretty cool in the summer. We do have a window unit, but it sat in the garage all summer and we didn’t miss it. Added bonus: our electricity bill averages $35 a month now! Squee! But I digress…

We’re having ceiling fans, but not that ceiling fan. It’s outta here. The ceiling tile is also gone-zo.

We have some patching up to do in some spots, like the place where the radiator pipe meets the ceiling:

You can see right up into the guest bedroom through that hole.

We plan on stripping the paint off of the radiator and leaving it bare. But radiators aren’t exactly pretty to look at, so we’re making covers for all of the units in the house. That way they won’t collect dust and we don’t have to maintain a paint job. Low maintenance living!

We have a few wall warts to rip out — ugly, unnecessary wall fixtures like phone jacks for land lines. We haven’t had a landline in 7 years and we’ve survived.

And we have 2 original windows that need to be replaced. It’s starting to get cold outside, so our single-panes look like this most of the time:

The room isn’t insulated at all and has 2 walls that face outside, so we have our work cut out for us. But first, we have to demo.

We sealed off the doors that lead to the living room (currently our bedroom), the stairs and the kitchen with thick plastic sheeting:

Then we gently pried off the original molding. We want to preserve the original stuff just in case we can use it in other parts of the house.

Behind the molding, we found a big gap between the floor and the wall. Stuffed inside was some old-school insulation:

Newspaper! We carefully unfolded the delicate pieces of paper and looked for a date:

December 12, 1932 — the newspaper is nearly 80 years old.

We were pretty geeked. This confirmed what we’d suspected for a while — the “new” part of the house was added on in the 1930s. That includes the kitchen, both bathrooms, laundry room and office. The original house was already 50 years old at the time. Crazy!

Once the molding was off, it was time to get serious. Our plan for the day:

• Expose the big brick wall
• Tear down the ceiling to expose the rafters
• Remove all the carpet from the room

Did we mention we had less than 8 hours to get all of it done? Annnnnnd we were off:

This is the same brick wall that we exposed upstairs in the hallway and office, so we knew the brick would be in good condition. It came off pretty easily:

We didn’t bother covering up the carpet because we knew we’d just roll it up and throw it away at the end of the day. It made things so much easier.

The only downside to the jackhammer is that it’s insanely loud. We waited till 11:30am to get started so our neighbors wouldn’t hate us. I was also worried about how Jabba the Mutt would react to the noise since she was hanging out in the next room. This is what I found when I went to check in on her:

She was curled up on the couch, napping right through the jackhammering. What a trooper.

After de-plastering the wall, Bradley showed me how to take down the ceiling tiles (just yank on ‘em on a little):

That hole wasn’t always there. Bradley punched it out to see what was behind the tiles. No shocker there: it’s lathe and plaster. I took over tile removal while Bradley “fixed” the doorway:

Just like the doorway upstairs, we wanted to get rid of the wood frame and have exposed brick sides:

And, just like upstairs, we have a neato header sitting above the door.

Those scars are chop marks from an axe. And the wood is so old that it’s turned grey — we love how a little bit of natural wood color peeks out from the scars. It adds a lovely bit of texture and dimension to the room.

We salvaged the original trim and the planks from the doorway just in case we want to use them later.

We already have big plans for the planks — they’re going to be reborn as nightstands for the guest bedroom! We’ll post the step-by-step on that when we get to it. But, rest assured, that pile of wood will eventually look mega-fabulous.

After all the tiles were out, it was time to pry the furring strips out:

The furring strips were nailed to the original lathe & plaster ceiling and the tiles were stapled right on top. After that, things got a little dusty:

We’ve demo’d our fair share of lathe and plaster walls, but never a ceiling. This was, by far, the dustiest job we’ve done in the house so far.

Bradley tore down the ceiling while I bagged debris. We learned a lot from our last big demo upstairs, so this time around, things were surprisingly fast. Everything seemed pretty under control, and then this happened:

A rogue lathe strip fell from the ceiling and crashed right through our single-pane window. The funny thing is that this was moments after I told Bradley not to break a window.

Me: “I’m gonna go outside and eat a sandwich. Don’t break any windows.”
Bradley: “Yes, honey, duuuuuh, of coooourse I won’t break any windows.”

Moments later, glass smashed inches from my turkey breast on whole wheat:

Mistakes: we make ‘em, too. The only difference is that we taunt each other mercilessly about them for at least a week afterwards.

We finished up everything — carpet removal and all — at 9pm on Sunday night. We were too exhausted to take after pictures. Plus it was too dark and dusty anyway. So we decided to wait a few days and let the dust settle before we did that. Those pictures are coming up later today. Get excited peeps. We are!

—

What we learned:

We actually learned what not to do from our demo upstairs. So this time we had it down to a science. Here’s how we streamlined the demo and cleanup process and got it all done in one day:

• Leave the carpet till last. We took out the carpet before we demolished upstairs. If we had left it in, we could have just rolled up the dust with the carpet and tossed it all out at once.
• Bag the plaster, not the lathe strips. The wood has nails in it and they poke through the bags.
• Sort the lathe strips into 2 sizes: long and short. Bind the piles together using twine. Stack the bundles together like firewood.
• Use shovels, not dustpans, to gather up the smaller debris and dump it into bags.
• Cut the carpet into strips and then roll it up instead of rolling it all up in one piece. Bind each roll with twine. Waaay easier to carry.
• Cut the carpet from the bottom instead of the top. Your knife won’t snag.

Stairs, stairs, stairs.

A couple of weekends ago, we removed all the carpet from the staircase and did a happy dance about how great our staircase looked.

Yeah. Our definition of looks great! might need a slight adjustment, but we were still thrilled to see the burgundy carpet in our garbage pile garage. The next project at hand: removing the 5000+ staples on the staircase. And, since this falls under the early morning cavewoman work category, I decided to get it over with on Saturday.

To make my job a little easier, Bradley found this weird little tool at Lowe’s and picked it up for me:

It’s a tool for pulling out small nails.

The prongs weren’t quite small enough to fit under the skinny staples we have under our carpet, so Bradley used a grinder to thin out the ends a bit.

It worked like a charm! Way easier than the old stapler / pliers / blood / sweat / tears routine. The only real hazards of this job:

Little tufts of discarded carpet padding would staple themselves to the soles of my sneakers. Very, very dangerous: if I wasn’t careful, this could have annoyed me to death.

Halfway through the staple-removal, I called Bradley over and we decided to do something about this weird platform at the top of the staircase:

It looks like something that was added on, and we’re not quite sure why. In order to go from the bathroom (down the hall on the right) to the master bedroom (on the left), you have to step down and right back up on the platform. It feels clunky and unnecessary.

And don’t even get us started on this:

Just don’t. We could go on for days, and we have way too much work to do ’round here. It has to go.

Bradley grabbed a hammer and a prybar and peeked under one of the steps:

As we’d suspected, there was solid floor underneath. The platform was a later (and confusing) addition. So we happily subtracted it:

We plan on putting up drywall over all of this lathe & plaster stuff in the hallway, so a little crumbling wall didn’t faze us. With the platform removed, we instantly felt like the staircase looked better:

The only thing that’s bugging us now is how the bottom step leading to the hallway ends so abruptly:

But there are a ton of solutions we’ve already started discussing. We could simply continue the step all the way to the end. We could install a big built-in bookshelf that’s the exact depth of the staircase. We could do floating shelves from floor to ceiling.

The floor is totally solid (we did a jump test) and it was nice to see unpainted wood underneath. The plank flooring is actually not bad when you see it without chocolate brown paint and white splatters everywhere. We’re feeling a little less pouty about it these days.

We salvaged the planks from the platform and will use it to patch up the master bedroom floors when we get in there.

After the platform was out, I spent a few hours removing staples, and by the time I took the after pictures, the lighting was completely different:

The staircase looks like a totally different shade of brown at sunset.

With the staples and the tufts of padding gone, the staircase is starting to look less and less hideous. We still need to repair a few loose bars in the railing and secure some of the steps that have gotten wobbly over the years. After that, it’s time to sand and paint.

What we learned from this project:

• Having the right tool for the job makes things way easier.
  The last time I spent 5+ hours pulling carpet staples, my wrist ached for days. The $11 tool made a huge difference.
• Pulling staples is tedious, boring work.
  Our strategy? Throw on some Bob Marley, grab a beer and get to yankin’. We see lame jobs like this as an opportunity to turn our brains off and go on autopilot for a couple of hours. Sure, it’s not fun, but it’s not exactly work either.

Haikus for our staircase.

Entryway staircase
clothed in burgundy carpet.
You make me vomit.

Lets send these old stairs
to live on a nice, big farm.
Pass the sledgehammer.

Burgundy carpet,
covered in crunchy plaster,
I will f#*k you up.

(That last one didn’t count as cursing because of the symbols.)

I’m having a raging case of writer’s block. The kind where you just sit and stare at the blank screen for an hour before giving up and doing something more productive. Like watching grass grow. Or picking your teeth. Or watching YouTube videos of a pug in a toilet. I thought a little haiku action would help get the words flowing, but the only thing my little exercise has done is remind me how much I hate our burgundy carpeted staircase.

The wood is promising. With a little sanding and a little painting, it could be a thing of beauty. But we’re having a hard time seeing past all the ugly right now.

Where there should be a fabulous old finial, there’s a crusty little glass bead.

Where there should be a gorgeous old world chandelier, there’s a shiny brass Home Depot light fixture.

With 3 burned-out light bulbs that we never changed because we’d rather just yank the whole thing out and toss it in the garbage.

One day after work, I decided I’d had enough. I gathered my ammunition and went into battle:

L to R: mini crowbar, pliers, chisel, screwdriver, gloves, coffee, iPhone.

I’m not sure why I grabbed the chisel and the iPhone. The screwdriver came in handy a few times, but mostly just for picking my nails. I am not a role model. Don’t do as I do, do as I say. Only don’t listen to anything I say because I have no idea what I’m talking about 78.3% of the time.

Anyway, I’m kind of an expert at removing carpet now, so in no time, I had the carpet removed and ready to be taken to the dumpster.

Luckily for me, Bradley came home from work at that exact moment. It was a nice change to have an assistant rather than being an assistant.

Especially when my assistant is a total cutie pie:

Hello, assistant,
will you take the carpet out
to the garbage pile?

Your warm, friendly smile
makes me want to pinch your cheeks.
The ones in your jeans.

If I turn up dead,
it’s because he has killed me
for that last haiku.

Still not sure why he puts up with me, but I’m glad I finally had a reason to use one of the hundreds of shots of his Levis-wearing hiney that I’ve snapped in the past 2 months. Bradley took the carpet out to the dumpster and our staircase suddenly looked a whole lot more naked:

I wouldn’t use the word fabulous just yet.

But at least it isn’t covered in burgundy carpet. Every little step towards a non-hideous home counts, people. Bully for us! We still have to yank out all of the staples and fix some wobbly steps before we can sand and paint. But we’re finally starting to see how pretty it could someday be.

One last haiku before I’m out:

I’m a designer.
I should stick to my day job
and not write bad poems.

You’re welcome, Internet.

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!