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!