Tag: carpet

The Carpets are IN!

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Yes, shout it from the rooftops and sound the gong: we have carpets! It was a looooooong wait, but last week, the carpets went in, and they are beautiful.

We decided on the Martha Stewart carpet collection at Home Depot, in “Gull”, which is a grey-ish off white. Very neutral….and so CLEAN. My heart does a little flip flop everytime I get upstairs. Let’s bask in the glory of before and after photos, shall we?

Main hallway facing the bedroom BEFORE:

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And the same view AFTER:

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Here’s a view of our master bedroom, just after Christian put down the plywood (following the extremely drawn-out flooring saga) in preparation of the carpet:

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And a “progess” photo, just after the underlay went down:

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But before we get to the final reveal, let’s take a trip back in time to 2009, from photos that we took on our very first day of official home ownership.  Wowee:

Screen Shot 2013-04-16 at 9.35.47 PMYeah, we’ve come a long way, baby…..

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It’s beautiful. And our house totally smells like new car! Now it’s time to slowly put things back together….

The Flooring Saga

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On Thursday, the carpet was supposed to go in upstairs. This would have marked a huge step towards the finish line in our upstairs renovation. Notice I said “supposed to”….

Let’s rewind for a minute: two Saturday’s ago we put out the plea to our wonderful friends: Give us a few hours of your time, we will provide pizza and beer, and our floor will go bye-bye. Two bedrooms with laminate flooring + bedroom/ hallway with wood parquet….four hours of work, max. Progress was happening:

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As the floor rip-up party continued, we kept running into sections of excessive glue and nails….someone never wanted this flooring to be removed! Then we got to the master bedroom. As Christian and his brother began pulling up the laminate, they realized that for some ridiculous make-us-want-to-egg-their-house reason, the previous home owners of our place decided to GLUE down the wood laminate flooring in our bedroom.

Yep, glue.

For those of you who haven’t worked with wood laminate, it is designed to “float” over the subfloor or old flooring. Nowhere is there ever any mention of glue.

Less than half of it came up, leaving us with this mess:

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Some google searching provided several ideas on how to pull it up: we bought a heat gun and slowly melted the glue inch by inch so we could scrape it up (the most painfully frustrating method), we rented a pneumatic
chisel from Home Depot (which is the LOUDEST thing I have ever heard) to try to chisel it up, poured hot water on it (didn’t help), shoveled it (too hard on the back), yelled at it….and then I cried. 40 square feet of laminate flooring was not budging.

We were told the carpet installation company would “assess” the floor and offer suggestions on how to remove it. Didn’t happen. The carpet installers took one look at that stubborn floor and left. We were totally defeated, and stuck with our chaotic mess for at least another week.

On Good Friday, Christian decided to give the floor one last shot. He got his circular saw, set it to a shallow setting, and literally cut out the floor.

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It worked. My amazingly patient and persevering husband tried everything, even after I had given up and admitted defeat, and he found a solution.

A few sheets of plywood to level the floor with the rest of the room, an we were set for carpet installation….and a relaxing Easter weekend!