Friday night plights

 

Friday evening I mopped all of the walls in the house and most of the floors. Since things were still pretty moldy and the spores were floating around we all wore masks. I'm claustrophobic when it comes to things that make the air I'm breathing feel warm so this was a stretch for me. We were working so hard that I was able to forget about it.    

While I was doing that B started to work on the carpet. Here's a before as a reminder. Very dirty, very blue carpet.

 

And out the door it goes! The green tarp looking thing is a bagster.  It is a bag that is a dumpster. You buy the bag and then you can throw your trash in there and drag it down to the end of your driveway and they'll come scoop it up. We <3 Bagster and we've used about three during this move at different times and different houses.

 Originally we were going to paint the subfloors as a stop gap measure until we had the time and money to put in wood floors. The more research we did on that the clearer it was that it wasn't an option for us. Even though it's cheap to paint the floors it takes a long time and then it has to cure before you can put furniture on it. Not a good thing for us right now. So! We ended up deciding to get indoor/outdoor carpet at Home Depot for $0.41 a sq ft!! What a deal! We picked out a smooth heather gray version. It'll tide us over until we get our forever floors. All things considered it goes down fast. And it was thin enough to easily fit on our station wagon.

Once the carpet and the pad were up it was time for the "fun" part. Since our replacement carpet is very thing we had to take up all of the tack strips, nails and staples from the subfloor.  With four rooms and a hallway to cover in 1.5 days it was a big, huge boring job.

First, you take up the tack strips. We started out with a pry bar but I discovered that using a pointed shovel was the most efficient.  G did the first room with the pry bar and the tack strips would splinter into a mess and it took forever. With the shovel you can pop it up at the nails and get the strip off in one piece. Very satisfying!

G worked on tack strips while I did staples. You have to remove each staple by popping it up with a flathead screw driver. Some of them zip right off but some of them will only come up halfway and then you have to use pliers to yank it out. This takes approximately 40 years. Per room. I'm not kidding it's terrible.

At about 11pm we realized there was no way we were going to get done that night, as we had planned. This was a low point because it was starting to dawn on us how foolish our timeline really was. I mopped over the remaining nails and tack strips and we wrapped it up and went home to shower.

8am the next morning we were at it again while B took some time to work in the kitchen (more on that later). Hours later and a bleary trip to the hardware store convinced us that we needed to call in reinforcements if we were going to be ready for move in on Sunday. Our awesome friends Kurt and Jessica came over to lend a hand! Jessica started cleaning up the de-stapled rooms with the shop vac and found all the ninja staples we missed. Kurt and B started cutting carpet and laying it behind us. In the middle of all of this we had to pick up the moving truck and take it to the old house so we ate Mexican food for dinner. B was nodding off at the table and Jessica had to remind me when to smile or laugh. We were so, so tired. BUT WE RALLIED! We came back and hit the floors again with gusto and miraculously got all of the carpet done before midnight.

 

 

Ta da! A big improvement!