So Long Office Carpet

We finally got around to removing the carpet in the office upstairs.  Unfortunately this story does not have a happy ending where we enjoy our newly revealed wood floors.

It’s the same process I’ve told before - twice - we cut the carpet into strips and rolled it up into manageable pieces that we tied with twine.  Then came the horrible carpet pad.  It left that sticky horrible mess I've complained about so loudly before.  It was horrible, it was disgusting and there was 165 square feet of it.  While pulling up the carpet and pad only took a few minutes, the removal of the sticky melted bits took hours.  Hours and hours and hours.  At least this was the last of it.  No more pink carpet and no more melted carpet pad in our house!  Wahoo!

Unfortunately, that’s where the celebration ends.  The wood floors themselves turned out to be a disaster.  Almost as bad as the master bedroom.  We were really disappointed.  While the master bedroom floors were painted around the perimeter, these were stained dark except for a 9x12 section in the middle where they must have had a rug.  Who does that?!

Worse, the floors are damaged.  In the middle the finish has worn off almost completely in some spots. There are a couple of chunks of wood missing from a few planks.  A previous shoddy electrician sloppily drilled holes into the floor when trying to install the outlet that was original to the room when we moved in (this was not done by Mike or our electrician).  Someone spilled reflective silver paint all around the radiator.  The rest of the floors are also covered in paint splatters.

Refinishing the floors is out of our budget right now.  We’d rather hold off until we can do the whole upstairs at once... someday.  We could do what we did in the guest room and cover up the middle with a big rug - except that a 9'x12' rug would cost as much, if not more, than installing wall-to-wall carpet in both the office and guest room.  So that’s what we decided to do.

We are getting the same carpet as our hallway, stairs and master bedroom - the oatmeal colored berber.  It’s being installed in our guest room and office on June 20th.  I’m a little disappointed that I won’t have the rustic dark wood floors I was hoping for in the office (cue the world’s smallest violin playing for me), but I will get over it.  And having the entire upstairs covered in the same flooring will give us a better flow and continuity between all the rooms.  A small silver lining.