Removing Carpet: Day 1 Report (July 13)

You've seen the before photos, so you know what we were dealing with. Our approach to carpet removal was to work in stages, rather than areas, completing one step in all the rooms before going on to the next. On Day One, we accomplished:

Stage One: Cut Up Carpet with the Amazingly Handy-Dandy Carpet Knife (Thank you, Al at Lowe's, for the tip!)

We found out, thanks to a newspaper used as binding, that the carpets had been laid in 1961 and that they came from:


Stage Two: Remove Tackstrips with Pry Bar and Pliers (No photos, but seriously cramped and bruised hands)

At the end, our floors looked like this:



That's the old wool undercarpet.

And our upstairs kitchen looked like this:


And I had heatstroke. It turned out that was the hottest day of the week. Our second floor is 20 degrees hotter than the first, and probably we weren't drinking enough water.