About Carpet

After you have finished ripping out carpet, you will find that your floor is infested with these:

and these:

That picture is not nearly ominous enough.

That picture is more like it. If you ever tear out carpet, your floors instantly become lava. Just like when you were a kid. Only, unlike when you were a kid, this new lava-floor will actually make your feet bleed.

Pulling the staples out is not hard, but it is very tedious. You take needle-nose pliers (or whatever your preferred grabbing device is) and forcibly remove them from the subfloor. There are usually one hundred million of them, so be prepared and wear some gloves. Unless you think blisters are a good look.

Tack strips are harder to remove, but there are fewer of them. I used the Wonder Bar (sounds of trumpets!),
and a hammer. Pound the prying tool under the tack strip and pry. It helps to pry right where it's nailed down, otherwise the tack strip breaks.

When we talked to the helpful Blue hardware store sales associate, she kindly informed us we SHOULD NOT remove the tack strips if we planned to have new carpet installed. The carpet installers will just charge you to have the tack strips re-installed (hooray for saving money and doing less work! Hardly ever do these things overlap in this way). By the way, I also learned that putting carpet onto tack strips as a way of installing it is called "Power Stretch", which is awesome.

Ripping out the Carpet

Our very first project, even before getting all our stuff into the house, was tearing out the repulsive carpet. We knew when we bought the house that we would have to tear out all the carpet within minutes of walking in the door because of the bad smell. So that is what we did.

This is the dining room:

Here Lucas is helping to pull up carpet in the living room:

(Our bed is in the living room right now because the upstairs will be re-carpeted next week. Carpet-installing labor-costs are lower if the rooms to be carpeted are free of furniture. Hence, we sleep in the living room.)

We are going to wait a bit to pull the carpet from the stairs. I started to peel the carpet from the stairs and noticed that the stair treads are actually hardwood!

This is an awesome revelation! It means that, sometime in the future, I can stain the treads and make the staircase a lot more beautiful! For now, we are temporarily going to leave the carpet to protect the raw hardwood (mostly from dog toenails) until I have time to stain and poly the treads.

Now we have a large pile of nasty carpet and padding in our garage (this picture is prior to transport into the garage). It is stinking up the garage, but it is much better because it's rolled.
The house still has a very mild smell of old pee (especially upstairs). I sprinkled an entire bottle of Glade Clean Linen scented baking powder on the subfloors upstairs, but unfortunately it's been rainy, so the subfloors haven't dried out well yet. I hope in the next few days, the sunnier weather will help dry the floors out more.

The town we live in will take the carpet in the weekly garbage! Hooray! Soon our house will be free of pee-pee carpet forever!

Empty!

Today we celebrate a monumental moment in our moving saga:


The storage unit is officially empty, and we are checked out!!! :D

Most of our stuff now resides in our garage . . .

which mean the cars reside in the driveway.

Not ideal, but we sure are thrilled to have taken this important step! It's all downhill from here!

Kitchen Dreams. Part 2b: Inspiration!

Here is a picture that inspires me layout-wise. This one is similar to the layout at the foreclosure house, so this kitchen arrangement would be do-able:

The sink and window in the house are along the right-hand wall instead of where they are in the picture, but otherwise it's the same. In the foreclosure house, this picture would be taken from the breakfast nook. We'd have room for the beverage center on the left side of the picture, near the fridge.

This one is even closer to the layout we will have, more of a open-galley type kitchen:
Instead of a flat window over on the right, we have a bowed out area. I'm planning to put the fridge over in the left side of the picture in our kitchen, because I'd rather not have the fridge in the walkway (if we put our fridge in the location shown in the picture, it would be right next to the doorway from the dining room). I'm not even sure we have room to copy this fridge location, because in the foreclosure house the laundry chute is there.

I was originally thinking we'd go with a light-to-medium cabinet and low-maintenance, light-colored countertops. I like the look of that combo and I was thinking it would appeal to many people.

Darker cabinet, lighter counter:

Lighter cabinet (white with chocolate glaze) lighter counter:
These days I'm leaning more towards a white or cream colored cabinet. I learned that black granite is the cheapest color, so we will probably go with that. I was hoping for quartz, but i learned that quartz actually costs more than granite! Crazy.

Here's a picture of a kitchen that is currently inspiring me. It's got the glossy black granite we'd be going with, plus the medium-to-dark hardwood floor. The cream-colored cabinets work so beautifully in the space!
Here is another one:I think I like this picture even better than the one above it. I think the unglazed cabinets look so fresh. Glazed cabinets are traditional and very beautiful, but the flat colored ones seem to open this little space up so much; they don't draw your eye as much to the surface detail. I also think the greenish-yellow color works beautifully to make the space warm (black and white can be so stark).

There is another reason white cabinets will work: I can paint them myself! We want to keep the existing cabinet boxes and just refresh the look with new doors and drawer fronts. MDF doors are cheaper than wood and take paint beautifully. I will have to build a few more cabinet boxes, but I'm really excited to DIY this project! I've had some practice building furniture, and I think I will be able to do a good job making cabinet boxes. Hopefully with cheap MDF doors and a couple gallons of a pretty, creamy white paint, we can give the kitchen a whole new look for less than $500.

What do you think? Am I nuts aiming for a $500 cabinet update? Have you had experience with white cabinets (do they get super dirty)? Is anybody out there "so over" black granite?

One Tiny Step for Backyard-Kind

Our new backyard is both the best of times and the worst of times.

It is the best of times because it is fenced in. It's full of trees but not too full of trees, so it's shady without being dark. It's a nice size (about 1/3 acre). It feels private, due to the slope and the trees.

It is the worst of times because it has at least a year (and probably more like many years) of neglect. The plants that the previous owner's tried to add are not good choices for their locations. Weeds x5000. And not just plain weeds, either, we have Power Weeds that fight back when I try to remove them.

Exhibit A:
Power Weed, aka "Stinging Nettle"

In the following picture, you can see a small area of low weeks on the far left, a center area of tall weeds, and then a lilac on the far right.The far-left weeds are these:
Soft little weeds with tiny flowers. At first I thought they might be chamomile, but after a little research they were revealed to be regular weeds. With their shallow root systems and sturdy stems, these were a breeze to remove. Lucas helped:


The middle weed group is made up mostly of this:
Stinging Nettle. A weed not to be messed with.

You can see it reaching into the picture on the far right:The bad thing about this weed is that every leaf is covered in minute stingers that cause burney lumps like a hundred bug bites. The good thing is that they tell you the soil has excellent fertility. This is what the leaves look like under a microscope (every little hair is a stinger):


My goal was to clear out all the weeds in the area so that I could A) stop looking at ugly weeds out the kitchen windows and B) plant this lovely assortment of bulbs (ignore the tulips, those are going somewhere sunnier).

Nothing like a good group of spring-blooming, self-naturalizing bulbs to make a girl love her yard. But, in order to do this, first I had to battle the Nettle.

First blood went to the Nettle . . .
(the smeary white stuff is Benadryl cream)

. . . but I won the war!


Weeds removed, bulbs planted. Now I can't wait until next spring!!