Carpet Removal: Day N+1 report

Whenever we watch HGTV or Trading Spaces or the like, they make it seem as though home renovation is primarily about coming up with clever ideas and having a lot of fun. They never seem to show the hard labor aspects of it and when they do they are played at triple-speed with funky music in the background. But as we have removed the carpet there has been no funky music, and at best we were working at normal speed.

Pulling up the carpet is not exacly a delicate operation, as it mostly involves literally pulling on pieces of carpet -- sometimes with the help of a special carpet-knife (who knew these things existed?!?), sometimes with the help of super-pliers, and often just with our own brute strength -- and those of you who know us know that brute strength is not exactly the specialty of the Revivalized Family...we're all about the intelligence and the cunning wit, but not so much the brute strength.

In any event, Day Three was basically like Day Two, only a lot more sore. My legs were sore. My arms were sore. My shoulders were sore. That little pad of skin where the thumb meets the palm? Really effing sore. I was sore in muscles that I didn't know existed and sore in muscles I know intimately. But we powered through nonetheless.

Today was Day Four, and we tackled the stairs and foyer. As K. mentioned, under the carpets on the second floor of the house were the original hardwood floors, only they had mostly been painted brown. This was not as bad as we had feared, but also not as pristine (and easy to refinish) as we had hoped. So you can imagine our pleasure when we started pulling up the carpet on the stairs and saw:


the same red wood that is found throughout the features on the ground floor of the house. As we pulled up all of the carpet we were pleased to see that it ws in pretty good condition. Far from pristine, but certainly as good as we could have hoped. The wood in the foyer was, as we had hoped, very similar to the wood throughout the ground floor, only clearly not as recently polished or refinished.

After several hours of work, we had made it through Stages I-III and even some of Stage IV of carpet removal (which, for those of you who don't commit our writings to memory, means that we still have to go through and pull out some of the staples, but that's all).

In summary, for those of you who like pictures and skip over all of my nattering on, today we went from this to this:



We still have some work to do (including getting more contractor bags to get rid of the trashpile peeking into that first photo, as we blew through our first box of them in less than a week), but we decided we had done enough to call it a day and blog about it.