Our New Old House

We’ve hired a professional flooring company to install tile in our bathroom.  We worked with them for several weeks, stopped in at the store twice, and had several phone discussions in setting all this up.  He told us we’d need to have our clawfoot tub disconnected so they could move it out of the room, which was fine.  The sink is wall mounted, so that’s not a problem.  They didn’t say anything about the toilet.

 This morning the crew arrived for installation and informed us that not only were we supposed to have the tub disconnected, but that the pipes needed to be cut down below the floor.  Also we’re supposed to have a plumber to re-set the toilet because they need to remove it. 

Was this stuff I was supposed to know already?  And even so, shouldn’t they have checked to make sure this was done before showing up for the install?

 Oh, yeah.  And they showed up on site and asked Brandon, “What kind of grout did you want for this?  We don’t have it on the order.”  DON’T HAVE IT ON THE ORDER?!  We discussed this in the store!  Pointed to the one we wanted and the guy wrote it down.  So they showed up with the wrong grout and will have to see if they have the color we wanted before going ahead with the job. 

As if that wasn’t enough, the gutter company that was supposed to stop by at 8am to give me an estimate didn’t come.  I left for work and half an hour after our appointment was supposed to be, the guy called me.  His scheduler (who I confirmed the address with three times, once by my entering it on their website for them) had given him the wrong address, several blocks up the street from my house.  When no one came to the door he spent half an hour working up an estimate on the wrong house before he bothered to call me. 

This is going to be one helluva day.

[tags]flooring, ceramic tile, contractors, bathroom, shower[/tags]

We’re getting started on the major projects in the kitchen and that includes flooring. Here’s how the floor looked when we first moved in:

Brandon started tearing up the old flooring and found some of this old linoleum:

Ironically, we had just picked out this new style of linoleum tile when we found the old stuff:

So we’re continuing the same type of geometric look that was done in the past, but with an updated look and improved durability. I can’t wait to have these floor tiles installed. That’ll be happening in three weeks.

[tags]kitchen, flooring, photos[/tags]

I ripped out the carpet in the bathroom this week. It smelled like pee. Here’s Zoot sitting on the carpet one last time:

Under the carpet was some nasty padding:

And under that was some wierd old flooring that looks like those marble colored rubber balls that come with a jacks set.

Anyway, that smelled like mildew. I put down some baking soda and left it there overnight. That got rid of the smell. Now it’s just ugly. But it’s better than pee-smelling carpet.

[tags]bathroom, cats, photos, flooring, carpet[/tags]

 Hopefully this will be the last of it. But don’t worry! I got to do the fun part today: demolition!

Today’s mission: demolish the old bathroom sink to make room for the new bathroom sink!

Scratch can’t understand why he can’t sleep in the sink anymore.

Tore out some of the carpet to reveal some really… um… interesting flooring.

And what’s left of the water damage from a leaking toilet.

Zoot got to sniff in the wall.

Some of the… um… interesting paint colors the bathroom had been.

Coming up later this week: the installation of our new pedestal sink! (It’s shiny!)

And a bonus photo for you: Scratch got nosy when Brandon was making garbanzo salsa.

[tags]bathroom, flooring, plumbing, photos, cats, vanity, sink[/tags]

I believe I have perfected my technique for removing the hard-as-a-rock cemented down carpet padding that was left behind from the late 60s/early 70s.
The good thing here is that the padding has hopefully protected the wood for all these years. The bad thing is that if I want to keep the original finish of the wood (which is a beautiful honey gold color) I have to remove all this padding meticulously by hand using a razor blade.

A very nice man named Lee Bleeker was among the attendees at our Des Moines Rehabbers Club meeting on Saturday and he stuck around afterwards to give me some advice about my problem. Lee is an old-school carpeting expert, certified as a Master in his trade by an association of his peers. He was able to expand on what I’d already learned in my research. He told me that this padding was not stuck down with adhesive (thank God!) It’s made of rubber and clay and over the years it dried out and got tamped down by foot traffic and as it dried, the clay hardened and the rubber lost its flexibility and there you have it: about a half acre of crusty, crappy carpet padding gumming up my beautiful hardwood floors.

He said I was on the right track with using a razor and wetting the material to loosen it. But he also explained that the dryness was the real reason why the padding was so hard. If I could force moisture back into the padding without harming the wood surface underneath, I’d have an easier time removing it and less chance of harming the finish.

So here’s how I put his advice into practice:

First I sprayed my mixture of fabric softener and water onto the padding, enough to really soak it.

Then I put plastic grocery bags down on top of the area I sprayed and tamped them down with my feet.

I did an area the size of two grocery sacks.

I laid down a section of old carpet I’d been using as a knee pad on top of the grocery sacks.

I left the rug there overnight.

In the morning it almost nearly all came off!

Here’s a section of the hallway I did using the same technique:

With just a few little touch up spots left behind, this is by far the best technique I’ve found so far for removing this horrible stuff. Many thanks to Lee for his generosity in sharing his wisdom with this newbie.