How to Remove Carpet in One Easy Lesson ... NOT.

It's not really hard, but it is far from easy on the hands, shoulders, knees,  well, pretty much the whole body.

The house has hardwood floors all through, and the ones in the living room, dining room and hallway have never been exposed.  Wall-to-wall carpet was put down the house was built in 1949 and have been down since.  At some point, and I would imagine this happened when the master bedroom was converted from two smaller bedrooms, the carpet there was removed and not replaced.  For some reason the carpet in the front bedroom, which was mine when I was still living at home was removed also.

I decided that since hardwood floors are terribly trendy now, and since it is easier to clean up doggy piddle and kitty throw-up from wood than it is from carpet, that I'd remove the extremely dirty carpet and give the hardwood a chance to shine.

I started in the dining room.  Having never done this before,
I just took a leap of faith ( or experienced a psychotic moment, your choice), and started by pulling an edge loose.  Carpet is attached all around the edge of the room to something called a 'Tackless' strip.  Named by someone with a skewed sense of humor (or absolutely no sense of reality ... your choice again) this strip of wood is filled with tiny tacks.  Beware.  They are sharp and they are waiting for you.   Think of them a little flat, wooden Zombies who want to eat your flesh if at all possible.  This is your only warning to be careful when pulling up the carpet edges.
Once I got a piece loose, I took a matt knife and cut the carpet into a manageable strip.  It's just cloth when you get right down to it, and is not really difficult to cut.  In fact, if you are going in the right direction, you can rip it evenly along a crosswise thread once you've started your cut.  Once I've cut a strip, I roll it and used some strapping tape that I had to secure the roll.  Duct tape works also, I just happened to have the other handy.

Under the carpet you'll have some sort of padding.  This is stapled to the wood where a sheet of the padding ends.  You'll be pulling up lots of staples, but this is actually the easiest part of the job.  Some of my staples had rotted and to get the bits out of the floor, I used a small tool called a "nipper".  Very handy.  If you have , as I did when removing those Tackless strips mentioned earlier, nails that are so old the heads rip off when the strip is pulled up, you can grab the body of the nail with the nipper and use that tool as a sort of plier to pull the nail up and out!

Removing the Tackless strips is a bigger job.  I think that's why I actually enjoyed the staple removal!  These strips must all be pulled up as gently as possible to avoid damaging the wood floor.  I  have a wonderful tool that looks a bit like a screw-driver with a pry head.  I happened to buy it years ago for some strange reason and had never had a use for it till now.  "Packratness" runs in my family genes, and for once this was a very good trait to have inherited.  You need a very thin pry to get the wood strip up enough to insert your larger pry-bar.  This is going to take several things: (a) the right tools, (b) sore hands from using those tools, (c) sore shoulders, (d) blood.  But you can do it!

Now your lovely hardwood floors have a chance to shine again!

Here's the dining room right after I got the carpet up.  I'm hoping to have the floors re-waxed.  Waxing was used when the house was built, and I love the look of it.  That will come soon.

If It Doesn't Move, PAINT IT!

It seems that this might be a good time to talk a bit about paint.  The good, the bad, and the truly horrible.

I started this project knowing that I would be using a lot of paint and wallpaper ... I just didn't have a clear idea of how much paint and wallpaper I would actually need .... or how much it had changed since the last time I had done either.  And change, as we all know, is not always for the better no matter how the spin doctors try to sell it.  This is terribly true in the case of the current state of wallpaper, but I will save that for a later post.  For now, let's just talk paint.

Oil? Latex? Let me say right off the bat that neither will come off clothing and both cling well to skin and hair.  Now that we have established that fact, how do they stay on walls or woodwork?  Some do well and others are complete horror shows and make you want to throw in the brush/pad/roller and just give up.  For me, paint has one job.  To cover something.  That's it.  Cover and stay on.  You'd think, wouldn't you, that all paint would do that simple thing?  Well, allow me to disabuse you of that theory right here and now!  All paints are not created equal, and there is at least one that I have found which I would suggest avoiding much as you would try to avoid standing on a train track with the 5:40 hurtling toward you.

In the course of this project, I have now used most of the major brands of paint available in the area.  Olympic, Valspar, Benjamin Moore, Bher, Glidden, Better Homes and Sherwin Williams (both the SW Cashmere and their HGTV brands).  Yep.  I've used that many.

Let's start with the Good as I shall try to maintain a positive approach to all this.  (Oh, let's get real .. THAT'S not gonna happen.)   Pittsburg paint is my favorite.  Having said that, I had no idea that during my non-painting years Pittsburg had been dropped by Pfaffs in Winston-Salem where I had counted on buying it.  Panic!  The closest place to get it was a store in Burlington which is 50 or so miles distant. With this as a given, I just could not justify the time/gas/money to drive such a distance every time I needed a new paint ... in some ways I wish I had, but hindsight is always 20/20.  So I had to decide on "next best".  I did a bit of research and found that PPG, also owns Olympic paint ... and that is sold a Lowes which is 1 mile away!  But would it be as good?

Not quite, but it is a good paint.  In fact, it has become my paint-of-choice for walls.  I also liked the HGTV brand sold at Sherwin Williams, but the Olympic One is a bit cheaper and does every bit as well.  All in all I've been quite pleased with it.  It does give one coat coverage as advertised.  I will usually go back and touch up spots after it dries because I like to use a paint pad, and now and then you'll see a spot that didn't quite get solid coverage.  I think this is probably the fault of the painter and not the paint.  So for me the winner is Olympic One followed by HGTV.

Third place would go to Bher flat which I used in my dining room.  Now the coverage was good in this paint, and it went on the wall really well and touches up well, but it did have a bit of tendency to drip ... not badly.  It is good paint and I would use it again.  But if you factor in cost-per-gallon, then for my money Olympic One is the clear winner.  Now these were latex.  Oil is a different story.

I decided to use oil based paints on my wood trim as I felt that oil had probably been used the last time the trim was painted which was probably in the early 70's.  At any rate, I felt it would be more durable on the mantle and around windows etc.  So ... I used oil on all my woodwork.  Ready?  My candidate for Worst Paint In The World?  Sherwin Williams Cashmere !!!!!!!!!!!!  I HATE this paint.  It will not stay on the wall.  It drips, runs and is generally a big ole hot mess!  And it costs about $60 a gallon!  LOSER!

I also used white oil based paint from Bher, Olympic One and Benjamin Moore ... I'd give B.M. the top place, but honestly they were all about the same.  B.M. had a better coverage, I think, so it gets top place.

Those are my takes on paint for what they are worth.  The good news?  Expensive is not always better.

What to do? What to do?

For many months of this this project I found myself relegated to either collecting and organizing items which my step-brother and his wife would need to make final dispersal choices about, or looking for small projects that I could do without disturbing the "off site storage".

One thing that I had to do a.s.a.p. for my own sanity was to paint over the ceiling in the den.  It was yellow.  A rather bright yellow.  Not something that appealed to me. As soon as enough furniture was removed I had to start.  Off I went to Sherwin Williams to choose a white that I thought would compliment the wood paneling of the room.  I chose a shade called "Snowbound" and bought the HGTV brand of paint.  Why, I hear you ask, did I not just go buy ceiling paint?   The truth is, I didn't think of it.  Also, I wanted shading to the white that I chose so I used a regular flat paint.

Perhaps this was fortuitous because not only did this paint do a great job of covering on a textured plaster ceiling, it was also a good paint with which to work.
Here you see the room as I began to clear it out.  For some reason the ceiling didn't show quite as yellow in color as it was to the eye.
NOW you can see it.  I'm sure the original thought was that the yellow would give the impression of sunshine.  For my eye, it just added to the darkness of the wood.  Originally, this den was a breezeway between the garage and the house.  As a child I loved it because the floor was smooth cement and I used it as my own private skating rink!  I can still remember rollerskating in an arabesque position while singing "Bippity-Boppoty-Boo" from Disney's "Cinderella".

Here is the new light fixture I found at Lowes to replace the original fixture from around 1960.