renovations

Color, Texture, Pattern, and Shine – Vol. 2

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Today is moving day (yay!), so this will be a quickie post.  The house isn’t even close to being finished, but our apartment lease is up so our stuff needs to go no matter what!

Skunk wants to know when he can see his new house.

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One BIG thing that was completed yesterday was our floors.  As you saw in one of our first posts, the old wrinkled carpet with crumbled padding was the first thing to go once we had the keys in our hands.  For the past 6 weeks, we’ve had nothing but a dark concrete slab to walk on every day:

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We’ve had a lot of advice from people on what to put down.  Hardwood, poured terrazzo, you name it.  Our final decision, and this is not going to be popular with a lot of people, is…  carpet.  Yes, we decided to keep with the original intent for the house and go with wall-to-wall carpeting.  When we looked around the house, there were so many hard surfaces — stone, wood paneling…  carpet would add a softness to the place and carry a color and texture element throughout the open living area.  Luckily, we found a carpet that was perfect for what we needed: it’s the same color as the original berber in the house (Jack found a box of original carpet remnants in the attic),

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but a low pile (so we can add throw rugs on top if we want) and a funky pattern (to be a bit modern).

So, here’s a sneak peek!  Here are the floors with our brand-new carpeting.

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…and a close-up of the carpet, so you can see the pattern.

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The funky squares and lines echo the design in our linoleum kitchen floor, and other design elements throughout the house.

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We almost didn’t get it, which caused a crazy scramble a few weeks ago.  The original color we’d picked out was on backorder, and the date kept getting pushed until it was out of our timeframe.  Thankfully our amazing carpet company put another color on hold that was almost identical, and were able to squeeze us in to install it the day before we moved in!  Whew!

Enough for now…  time to get rolling so we can move our stuff onto that new carpeting!

Magic Carpet Ride

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You don’t know what…  we can find…  why don’t you come with me, little girl…  on a magic carpet ride…

As we mentioned in our previous post, our first humongous priority is de-smoke-ify-ing this house.  Which is easier said than done, because over several decades smoke residue sticks to EVERYTHING.  In order to get rid of the stale smoke smell, we need to remove or clean everything we can get our hands on…  and the major culprit is the carpet.

It has to go anyway, smoke or no smoke — it’s several decades old, old enough that the padding underneath turned rotten and caused all of the carpeting to wrinkle and pull.  So one hour after we closed on the house, Jack was on his hands and knees with a knife to start with this massive undertaking.

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It turns out the padding wasn’t just rotten, it was full-on dried out.  Almost every square inch of padding in the entire house (and every room is carpeted except for the kitchen, so that’s a lot of padding) has taken on the consistency of hard crackers.  So Jack’s been ripping up the rugs room by room, and then going back with a long-handled floor scraper to dislodge all of the hard stuff that’s stuck to the sub-floor from decades of use.

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Needless to say, it’s a bit dusty in the house at the moment.

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Ripping out the carpets also helped us uncover the source of a problem our inspector had identified in the master bedroom.  He had noticed that the floor had about a 2-inch slope from the center to the edges, but we couldn’t get to the root of it until we peeled the carpets back.  Turns out there is years of water damage in one corner of the room that started to rot the floor and wall away, and messed with the sub-floor.  Add rebuilding that to the list of help we’ll need from our contractor!

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Not everything we found was negative, though.  We discovered a really cool feature of the house that must have been state-of-the-art at the time: alarm sensors on the floor!  This house is alarmed to the hilt, with bells and panic buttons and such in every room; the sensors were yet another way to keep them safe.  At each doorway, as well as the entrance to several rooms, a wired pad was installed under the carpet padding.  If anyone broke into the house, when they stepped on the carpet the weight would trigger the sensors in the pad underneath, and the alarm would go off.  Genius!

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It’ll be a bit before we put down new carpeting, given all the floor-fixing that has to be done first.  But once it’s finished, wow will this place look so much better!