Carpet Diem

Today was a red-letter day in our part of the borough-- It was Annual Large-Item Curbside Pick-Up Day.

Large-Item Curbside Pick-Up Day comes but once a year, so you want to take full advantage of its joys.

This year, I didn't have much to throw out. Just a couple of really large cardboard cartons that yeah, I really should recycle but they'd hardly fit in my car, let alone in the recycling dumpster.

So last night I got them off my back porch and onto the curb.

What else should I get rid of? Went down the basement, to survey the scene there. I noticed the roll of fake berber carpet scraps on top of the metal paint can shelf. No, I might use some of that to make scratching posts for my kitties.

But wait a minute. Carpet . . . carpet . . . Oh, hey, I still have that godawful filthy pet-hair-covered over-ten-year-old installed by the previous owners that my oldest cat dumped the can of white paint all over back in 2003 berber carpet on the stairs going up to the third floor!

Seize the day! Seize the day! It's gotta go sometime, and if I got it out to the curb last night, the borough would take it away this morning for free! Otherwise, it's an upcharge from the regular trash haulers! Do it! Who cares if it's not on the agenda! Do it now!

So I did. Took about five hours to remove carpet, pad, tack strips, and most of the staples. Well, a lot of the staples. Around here, the carpet staples have carpet staples, and they don't give up easily-- I've got the scratches to prove it.

Look what we have here! No paint!

Soft but tough things with lots of pointy ends (No, Rhadwen did not go to the curb. Just supervising)

The good news: The paint didn't seep through too badly, and the treads and risers were never painted!

Carpet avalanche

The bad news: One or two of the treads are cracked or broken. Couldn't feel it through the carpet and pad, but now it feels weird to walk on. Of course the really broken one is at the bottom with the doorway casing sitting on it. More complicated than just prying it up, bracing it underneath, and reinstalling it.

The inevitable news: The treads will have to be stripped anyway, because they do have splotches of paint on them. And I'm thinking I want the floor to be not so dark, anyway.

So I'll redo the treads in a lighter toned natural finish. But I'm thinking of painting the risers white to match the rest of the trim going up to the 3rd floor. Seems a little stark as it is, and I think it'll set this part of the house off as a different zone.

But here's the question: Considering all the wood stripping I've been doing around this place, am I a screaming hypocrite to even consider painting any woodwork that's currently natural finish? Or am I just looking to do what'll look and work the best?

I'm open to input. This much is certain: I got up this morning and looked out the window, and all that nasty old carpet is gone! It's gone!

Playing Queen Dragonfly in My Own Little Realm

This is going to be one of those self-indulgent posts that's more about keeping a record of what I have (or haven't accomplished) than about supplying edifying content for the Houseblogs community at large.

When we last saw our heroine early on the morning of the 19th, she was whingeing about the failure of a certain paint stripper to deliver on its promises-- or about her own inability to take advantage of its glorious potential.

Well. Later that day, I called a friend who took down and refinished all the wood trim in his house. How easy is that, I wondered, vs. doing it in situ?

Oh, much easier. And if you crack it, you can just kind of nail or glue it back together. If it isn't too badly cracked, that is.

Oh. Right.

So I made one little experiment into taking the trim down, the first since I tried it a year or two ago and ended up with a grievous crack in one piece. I think you'll agree that this casing, at least, needs to be taken down and reerected anyway. It's crooked, and there's a gap between the trim and the wall that's as wide as an quarter inch in some places. All filled with spackle or some other rock-hard goop.

It's got something to do with the front room and its conversion from a front porch. I'm not sure when or how this was done, but it wasn't the neatest job in the world.

So I took down one piece. One. And hammered out the nails. Then a friend came by and that was that.

Until later that evening, like, after midnight, when I finished removing the stinky old beige carpet from the first floor-second floor stairs. In time for Friday morning trash pickup, again.

I rather like this little detail on the bottom tread; so simple and elegant, the way it curves into the newell post.But alas, the edge of the curve is a butchered mess. I wish I'd counted how many staples it had in it. Little copper staples from the green plush carpet laid by the POs-1. Big steel staples from the beige berber carpet the POs put down. Staples, staples; staples on top of staples. It was a staple convention, a staple infestation! I was using a hooked dental pick to pull them out, and constantly rammed my knuckles on the hallway floor every time another vicious bit of pointed wire came away. You know how people simper about not cussing around the clergy? I must have tramatized my sanctified ears sadly, with all the cussing I was doing around my reverend self--Lord help me!

And Lord help this stair tread. I know I'll have plenty of use for wood filler here and there as I de-beige this house, but this piece will call for genuine wood filler artistry.

Friday proper was devoted to the lawn and garden. Nothing exciting, just mowing, mulching, weed-pulling, herbicide-painting on the spurge in the cobblestone path of the vegetable garden; that sort of thing.

Saturday, ah, yes, Saturday, I tackled the back porch. My POs used it as a lovely social space, with a glass-topped table and cushioned chairs and all the rest of it. Me, I've let it degenerate into a dumping ground:

It took all day and into the night to bring it to this:

No, that is not my idea of a great furniture arrange-ment. What you see there with the Adirondack furniture is another Project. Those pieces all need scraped, primed, and painted. I even have the paint. Now I have the room to do it. Let the games begin.

The hilarious thing is that now that the porch looks halfway nice (for the first time in almost three years), I keep going out there with the vacuum cleaner to keep it that way.

Don't worry. I'll get over it.

Tomorrow I'm off to Athens, New York, for the three-day lime plaster restoration workshop at Howard Hall Farm. I'll try to report on it when I get back.

(I'm not averse to doing it while the seminar's in progress, but out of the three laptops I own, not one is capable of a reliable hookup to the Internet. At least, I don't think so . . . )

Hazardous Waste

Last night, Thursday, I decided that's it, the smelly second floor hallway rug has got to go. Aesthetic considerations suggested it was a good idea to rip it out. Common decency, sanitation concerns, and olfactory peace combined to make its removal absolutely necessary. Before company arrived. Now.

(After all, who wants to think she's lost her visiting parents a nights' sleep by the prodigious pong of pet pee wafting in through the bedroom door? )

It was nasty work. The carpet was filthy and stained, its edges booby-trapped with staple-tacks like shark's teeth. (Is my tetanus shot still up to date? I hope so!) The material had to be cut in pieces to satisfy the trash hauler, but it refused to go down without a fight.

As for the pad, you'd think the installers thought it would get up in the middle of the night and sneak away. Staples everywhere! Staples through the pad material and staples in the wood floor just for the fun of it! Staples smashed into the woodwork! And as a change from staples, broad-headed mails driven down to less than flush!

Well, I got the underlayment removed and bundled for pick-up, too.

Then the tack strips around the edges had to be pried up. Nails, more staples, splinters: at any moment I expected my dog to yelp in pain because he'd picked up something in his paw.

But the job got done.

Now I want to know, what are my options with the pine board flooring underneath?

Yes, fill the nail holes, sand it, maybe restain it a different tone, finish it. But what have people done about wide cracks like I have here? What do you do when you feel you could lose a small continent down the gaps?

And don't ya just love that slope in the floor! At some points it's more than an inch below the bottom of the baseboard.

I contemplate a really big shoe moulding. But maybe there're other options I haven't thought of. That is, short of tearing the surface off and shimming it up to level?

And in other news . . . here's the new bathroom mirror trim without the grout. That happened early this morning. I'm "borrowing" what little grout I need from some friends, as soon as they remember where they put the box.

Help! I Mean, Hooray! My Mother's Coming!

Today I spoke with my mom in Texas to wish her greetings and felicitations on Mothers' Day. And she confirmed that she and my stepfather are coming here in June!

Yes, I knew that was in the works. They've been talking about it since last Winter or before. But ack! That's less than a month away! I was going to have all this glorious work on my dining room woodwork and wallpaper done for them to see it!

Well, forget that. The wallpaper I've got my eye on is a William Morris pattern that has to come from England. No time to get it and hang it by mid-June, even if it were in the budget at the moment.

All right. What shall I resolve before God and all the neighbors (virtual and literal) to accomplish before they arrive?

I can install the new kitchen sink faucet I bought nearly two months ago, to replace the one that's leaking all over the countertop.

I can do something about the gaps next to the bathroom medicine cabinet that were left when I took out the old one with the ugly built-in fluorescent lights. I have the plaster spackle. And the fill-in tiles. And a new medicine cabinet, so the one I'm borrowing from the basement loo can go back where it belongs. All I need is mastic and grout and getting around to it.

What else? My POs had dogs that left their mark, shall we say, on the beige carpet of the second floor hallway. My own dog has followed suit. It does not look nice. It smells worse. Do I get the carpet cleaner in? Or do I use this as an excuse to rip it up?

I should be able to get these things done, if not more. Right? So now I've put it in writing in public and I have to do it.