The Nightmare Base Molding

We wanted to pull the mismatched base molding off the wall of the guest room.  It shouldn't have been that hard, after all it was only a few inches high.  Except at some point in the history of this house, someone bought a huge Costco-sized box of 5" nails and proceeded to use them on EVERYTHING in this place.  From installing trim to hanging roller shades... these 5" nails have popped up everywhere, and this strip of molding was no exception.  It was slow and frustrating, but we managed to locate and remove the ridiculous nails and only minorly damaging the wall behind.

Except then the molding still wouldn't budge... and we realized there were more nails at the very bottom, about half an inch from the floor.  We had to remove a piece of tacking strip for the carpet to even see what we were dealing with:  ridiculous 3" nails placed every 1.5" along the bottom.  That means there are 87 3" nails across 11 feet of base molding we still have to pry out.  Complete and total overkill on the installation!  And this makes me wonder, if someone is going to put so much effort into installing this base molding with that many nails to survive the apocalypse and spend so much time putting it up, you'd think that they would at least put the effort into making the molding MATCH THE REST OF THE FREAKING HOUSE.

Let's just say I'm a little frustrated.

So now the base molding removal has been postponed until after we remove the carpet because the carpet and tack strips are in the way.  We had to wait for wood floors anyways to install the new molding, plus adding quarter round shoe molding around the entire room (there used to be some from the pre-carpet days, you can see the nail holes/damage in the base molding around the room when the carpet is pulled back).