Our New Old House

Lately I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how to deal with the crazy petrified carpet pad that fused itself to the hardwood floors in the living room, dining room, and hallway. It is some sort of diabolical material that is impervious to water, laughs at me when I use a sander, and outlasts me every time I try to use a utility scraper. This weekend I wanted to see if I could at least get the fabric backing off the top layer. Since the idea to use Downy fabric softener on the wallpaper had been so clever, I thought I’d try it on this floor thing. My logic was that if Downy works by breaking down some of the fibers in your clothes, and also does that to wallpaper, why not see if it would dissolve the bond between the fiber on my floor monster so I could scrape it off with something less damaging than a jackhammer. Well, to my surprise (these hairbrained ideas of mine usually don’t get very close to being successful) it worked! I sprayed a section at a time and let it sit for five minutes and when I came back the fabric was easy to scrape and actually peeled off in chunks in some places. Bravo!And for a bonus Bravo! I also found out that not only did the Downy work on the fabric, but it also made the padding itself somewhat tacky. I could scrape my knife over it and peel off curls of material rather than hacking away at it for hours to gain two inches of progress and a broken razor blade. I started alternating between working on the fabric and treating and scraping the hallway. You have to let the stuff sit for five minutes anyway, right? So by 1:00 I had removed half the fabric from the padding in the dining room and about a foot and a half by two foot chunk of the actual padding from the hallway.

Here are some pictures:

Some of the crap I scraped off the floor after applying Downy and water:

The fabric pulled up pretty easily with Downy:

A glowing example of why I am working so hard to remove this stuff right, and not do a half-assed job of it. Look how beautiful that wood is underneath!

The sander was having to take off too much of the finish to continue using it. It’s not any faster than scraping carefully with a razor anyway and the razor does a better job of keeping the finish intact.

I’ll just have to keep picking away at it whenever I get a chance. We’re not in a huge rush, so if I can get a couple square feet done each week, I should be totally done in, well, I’m not going to do the math, a few months. Or something. But looking at that floor, it will all be worth it.

[tags]carpet, photos[/tags]

I was popping some of the tiles off the wall in the kitchen and was somewhat alarmed at how greasy everything was.  But when I got to the second row of tiles down, I found PUDDLES OF GREASE that had pooled inside the tiles!!!  AAAAHHHH  GROSS!!! 

I’m a vegetarian and my walls are literally DRIPPING with rendered animal fat! 

Picture!

Brandon got a call yesterday afternoon that our chimney and fireplace company had a sudden opening and they’ll be able to install our wood burning stove insert and reconstruct our chimney TODAY!!!  This is great news and I can’t wait to go to the house after work today and check it out.  This comes right in the middle of the electricians’ work, so we are knocking two of our biggest, most expensive jobs off the list this week!  Hopefully with a little cleaning we can move our bed in and start sleeping there early next week. 

I’m so excited I could just burst!

After this weekend’s frenzy of heavy lifting and back breaking work, I’m left with a house full of crumbling wallpaper, greasy cabinets, and weird pus colored petrified carpet padding. I wandered the house on Sunday, picking at wallpaper here, scratching at carpet padding there, knocking down a few kitchen tiles, and just generally taking in the scope of how much crap is stuck to the walls of this house.

I loaded up my utility scraper with a fresh razor blade and got to work on one wall in the living room. Chunks of the wallpaper came off easily, leaving areas here and there where I’d have to scrape a little more vigorously later.

I quickly got bored with that wall and moved on to sand some of the crap off the floor with my coarse grade sanding pad on my orbital sander. When I could no longer feel my hands from the vibration, I got up and took a screw driver to the plastic tiles on the wall of the kitchen.

The good thing about this house is that I will never have to work on one project so long that I get totally burnt out on it. I can just keep drifting from room to room, making a little progress on each project. It all adds up to a lot, even though it’s spread out all over the house.

The biggest challenge was just keeping my utility knife unclogged. Some of the wallpaper was painted over and so when I scrape it, the stiff chips get stuck in between the razor blade and the part that it slides into. I had to keep scraping them out with a screw driver. I wonder if I got the wallpaper wet if that would make it easier to scrape or if that would just make it worse. Any thoughts?

Day two and amazingly our team came back! Craig must be a glutton for punishment, because he stuck with us at the house from 9am to just after 5pm! I could barely keep up with him!

I started my day at 7:30, which was admittedly difficult after being at the house until just after midnight the night before. I got to the house at 8:15 and had a few moments to just stand in the middle of everything in the daylight and accept the challenge. I got to walk through the rooms and touch the walls that are now MY walls, and scuff the carpet padding on the floors that are now MY floors. I appreciated how the sunlight comes through the windows in the front bedroom, and further confirmed that that will be OUR bedroom.

I decided to go get some coffee to get me fueled for the work ahead of me, so I walked the three blocks to the little coffeeshop in the neighborhood. And guess who I met there! Mom and Craig were just finishing up their breakfast of waffles and eggs. Maybe that was Craig’s secret to his unstoppable energy! Gotta buy me some waffles!

They paid their check while my order was in for a couple of breakfast sandwiches for me and Brandon to eat at the house so they headed back to the house.

When I got back, Craig was already setting up the saw horses we borrowed from Mom’s house. He put me to work (Yes, HE put ME to work.) pulling nails from the paneling Brandon and I had finished taking off the night before. Between the two of us we pulled all the nails and stacked the paneling in two piles, one that was small enough to fit in his burning bin on his rural property, and one that would need to be cut.

Brandon was still in bed back at Mom’s house and I found out later when he did arrive that the tetanus shot he’d gotten the day before made him kind of sick overnight. He was feverish and needed a little more rest, but he felt fine when he arrived around noon.

By the time Brandon arrived, Craig and I had all the paneling cut and stacked in Craig’s truck. I couldn’t believe it!

Here’s our pile of garbage before cutting down the paneling:

Here’s all the paneling in the back of Craig’s truck:

Here’s a photo that illustrates exactly how I feel about paneling:

When we were done with that, Brandon arrived, very well rested, just in time for lunch! Grandma had set up food for us down the street. We visited with Grandpa and ate yummy tostadas, fideo, and Mexican rice. It was tempting to stay there in the air conditioning, but Craig was getting restless to get back to work (I know! Right?) so we trooped back down the street.

When we arrived back, Craig gathered an armful of brooms, shovels, and buckets, and burrowed down into the basement. We wouldn’t see him emerge until nearly 5:00 later that evening.

Meanwhile, Brandon and I made a long overdue trip to the hardware store. We placed an order for a fridge and a dishwasher. They’ll be delivered on Monday afternoon. Here’s a list of what else we bought:

• new latch for the front storm door
• screen guard for front storm door
• floor lamp for the living room
• 5″ random orbital sander
• razor blade utility scrapers
• scouring pads
• rubber gloves
• compact flourescent lightbulbs
• portable radio

When we got back, Craig was away hauling buckets of dirt and debris that he scooped out of our basement. Mom has a decorative pond in her back yard that she’s been wanting to fill in, so that’s where the dirt went.

While Brandon figured out how to get the last two stubborn pieces of paneling out from over the bookshelves…

I started tackling the weird carpet padding that was left behind in the living room, dining room, and hallway. The carpeting had been laid in the late sixties or early seventies. It was a professional job, but the padding underneath has the inconvenient quality of becoming some kind of rock hard material that has adhered to the hardwood. Craig has a lifesaving tool that pulls staples, so I started pulling staples so I could start figuring out the safest way to remove this crumbly, chalky stuff without damaging the hardwood underneath.
Here’s the padding after I pulled off the cloth-like fiber layer:

There’s a crud-covered staple on the end of that tool that I’m about to pull out (gently!).

This stuff is NOT going to go quietly.

But the sander seems to be taking care of it. I’m going to put a coarser pad on next time, but this will be a good way to get rid of this crazy stuff.

I know, the mask and goggles work better when they’re on my FACE, but I was just demonstrating for this photo. I was fully protected for the actual work. I promise.

We have a plan for this afternoon to just keep plugging away at it to try to make it mostly livable. I took a little break to dream about how warm and comfortable our living room will be when it’s done.

See you next time with even more updates!

[tags]carpet, future plans, paneling, photos, power tools[/tags]