The Guestroom Carpet is Gone

Over the weekend we finally pulled up the carpet in the small bedroom.  This was a job I'd be dreading since my mom and I pulled up the carpet in the hall and stairs... it was disgusting and messy.  The carpet itself was old, dusty and dirty- and worse underneath was the melted, sticky carpet pad.  Little bits of blood red sticky rubber goo that clung to EVERYTHING (skin, shoes, pants, etc) covered the entire floor and we had to clean it up without tracking it onto the beige carpet in the hallway.

Once all the tack strips and staples were pried off the floor, we vacuumed with the shop vac and then vacuumed again.  And a third time for good measure in hopes that some of the sticky rubber bits would be sucked away. They didn't budge.  So then began the grueling, painful task of scrubbing the floor by hand.  Mops, sponges and scrub brushes are no match for these little rubber bits because they are rubber and therefore impervious to water and too sticky.  The consistency of the goo is hard to describe, it's like glue paste and chewing gum combined.  Each square foot of stickiness required a painful two prong approach - first rubbing/chafing away the bits with a dry paper towel and brute force, then scrubbing away the stickiness with a bottle of method all purpose cleaner.  This teeny tiny room took two hours to clean, and by the end my hands were numb.

The floors are not in the best shape.  We mistook a lot of little paint splatters for dust until the floor was clean.  And there are some big paint splatters too - a big gray mess and a big black smear by the long wall.  Apparently some careless jerk person from long ago decided drop cloths were unnecessary.  Luckily we can still make the floors in here work until we (someday) have the money to refinish them.  None of the weird painted outer edging of the hallway entered the space.  The worst of the paint spills are along the long wall - a prime place for furniture due to the small size and awkward layout of the room.  And we always planned on putting a big 5x8 rug down in the middle of the room, which will actually cover most of the floor space anyways.

As you can see in the pictures, we also (finally!) conquered the mismatched molding from hell.  It may have taken blood, sweat, tears and more cursing that a pair of sailors - but it's finally gone.  If you want to refresh yourself with what we were up against, I wrote about it here.  Honestly it took so long that I'm too exhausted to rehash it, knowing what we were up against you can just imagine it.  But it's gone! GONE! And now we can finally replace it with molding that blends with the rest of the house.  Hooray!