Return of the Hardwoods

The first time we looked at our house, we both knew it would look amazing with hardwood floors instead of tacky pink carpet. We knew there were beautiful hardwood floors dying to get out from underneath the pink nastiness. But we had no idea we'd have to tear through carpet, padding, linoleum, and crusty black stuff to get to them.





Even after we dug the floors out from their various 70's-era prison cells, they certainly weren't restored to their Victorian glory... yet.





On Wednesday, April 11, that all changed. That morning, a company called Mr. Sandless showed up to give our 100-year old floors a facelift that would make even Joan Rivers jealous.



As you may have guessed from the name "Mr. Sandless", the refinishing process was done without kicking up mountains of sawdust in our house. The process was done completely with chemicals that -- it's safe to say -- should be kept out of reach of small children.



According to one of workers (who is a carpenter by trade), our floors are made of "heart pine". He said that these days, heart pine floors are only found in old homes. And that if we wanted to put a new floor in our home made from heart pine, we could expect to pay an arm and a leg (actually, more like 2 arms and 3 legs, plus a kidney or two.) Needless to say, we were very glad that restoring our heart pine floors didn't cost nearly as much. In fact, it cost us about 1/3 of what we would have paid to have the floors resanded, and took about 1/4 of the time, with 1/10,000 of the mess.



The crew from Mr. Sandless was a little skeptical about whether their chemical process would be able to pull up most of the leftover debris on the floors. They were especially nervous about all the glue on the dining room floor, leftover from the linoleum.



As you can tell from the finished product, those chemicals got the job done better than any of the crew -- not to mention the two of us -- could have imagined.







Sadly, Mr. Sandless wasn't able to do anything about the black crud in our upstairs hallway. And we'll have to sand the oak staircase the old fashioned way. But they managed to make all the other rooms look amazing: all four bedrooms, the living room and especially the dining room.

After at least 30 years of nightmarish carpet and linoleum, our old Victorian finally has floors it can be proud of again.

Stairway to Heaven?

Suffice it to say, getting all the endless supply nasty pink carpet out of our house ended up being a much bigger task than we thought it would be. First, we had to pull about 700 staples out of the floor in our living room. Then we discovered that there was linoleum underneath the pink carpet in our dining room (which took forever to peel off the floor). So as we headed into the third leg of the Pink Carpet Removal Triathalon, we were hoping the worst was behind us. No such luck.




Things started off okay. Nobody fell down the stairs. Nobody poked out an eye. Aside from a few minor scrapes (thanks to the stupid tack board), we made our way up the stairs and into the hallway on the second floor. We both had visions of an ugly-carpet-free home in our heads. And then our house hit us with its latest surprise...



Underneath the nasty pink carpet we found -- you guessed it -- another layer of nasty carpet. Only this time, it was vintage 70's with a yellow and brown checked pattern. (Obviously, nobody who has ever owned this house in its 99-year history has ever had any taste in carpets.)



Worse than the 70's carpet itself was the 3/4-inch thick layer of black crud underneath the carpet. Our best guess is that is used to be a rubber carpet pad. But for all we know, our hallway could have been a tar pit where paleontologists discovered dinosaur fossils. Either way, the black stuff was fused to our floors and our hallway looked awful.



Unfortunately, all the floor scraping in the world wasn't going to scratch the black stuff off. So now we're hoping that when the workers come in on Wednesday to refinish the floors, they'll have some heavy duty equipment with them to get rid of it. Otherwise, we may have to cover it up with new wood. Or (God forbid) more carpet... just as long as it's not pink.



When it was all said and done, in our first 9 days in our house, we managed to remove about 1000 square feet of ugly pink carpet, tan linoleum and hideous 70's carpet. It was definitely more than we bargained for. But, aside from the hallway upstairs, the floors were in pretty decent shape.

On Tuesday of next week, the garbage man comes for bulk pickup. Bye bye, carpet.

Attack of the Linoleum

Sunday April 1, 2007: After our success ripping up the carpet in the living room, we figured the dining room would be a breeze. But our house must have known it was April Fool's Day because it played a nasty joke on us in the form of ugly 70's-era linoleum underneath the equally ugly pink carpet.



Even though we enlisted the help of our friend Tricia, the evil linoleum looked like it was going to get the better of us.



Lucky for us, the people who laid the linoleum 20+ years ago must have just as lazy as the people who put carpet over the linoleum 10 years later -- because they didn't bother to glue down most of the center of the room. So we managed to rip that away, which left us with just the border. All the scraping in the world wasn't going to pull this up. So we decided to call it quits until we could make a run to Home Depot for reinforcements in the form of adhesive remover.

A 45-minute trip to Home Depot turned into a week of taking care of other projects around the house. By the time we got back to working in the dining room, it was late on Sunday afternoon, 4/8. We doused the floor with the adhesive remover. Based on the smell we figured it would eat through all the linoleum glue in no time.


Three coats of adhesive remover later, the majority of the border was still stuck to the floor. So we ran off to Home Depot for another round of reinforcements. This time, we came back with a 4-ft floor scraper (the kind they use to remove tile floors).



After another heavy dose of adhesive remover, we put the floor scraper to work. And, with a lot of pushing (and maybe a little swearing), the linoleum glue finally started coming off the floor.



One more dose of adhesive remover finally reduced the leftover glue to a puddle of brown goo that Mr. Clean was nice enough to take care of for us. Final tally: 6 days, 3 people, 2 bottles of adhesive remover, 5 coats of chemicals, 1 industrial floor scraper and half a bottle of Mr. Clean. The final result: No more nasty pink carpet in the dining room with three days to spare before the workers come in to refinish all our floors.

129 Fairview Ave: Destruction Day

After settling in on Friday, we got down to business first thing Saturday morning. Our mission: find out what the heck is underneath the ugly pink carpet.


Considering the rug had been there for at least 10 years, we thought we'd take our mothers' advice and wear masks while we ripped up the carpet.



Before long, the old pink carpet was history. The foam padding was all that was standing between us and what we hoped would be beautiful hardwood floors.



Bingo! Hardwood floors! All things considered, they weren't in horrible shape... not perfect, but not a lost cause either.





After pulling staples and nails out of the floor for several hours, we gave the floors a long overdue washing.



At the end of the day, we had learned two things: First, ripping up carpet is a lot harder than it looks on Trading Spaces. And second: Even an old hardwood floor looks 100 times better than a nasty pink carpet.

129 Fairview: The Beginning

Hi, everyone.

After months of transition from Massachusetts to New Jersey, we're finally here. We closed on our home in Voorhees, NJ on Friday 3/30 and quickly got to work making it our own. (Which, you'll soon see, was easier said than done.)

Our new home is a 99-year old Victorian, on almost a full acre of land. It's got 4 bedrooms, finished attic, circular driveway and a fenced-in back yard. It's also about a 2 minute walk to the train stop in Voorhees. Which means we can get to work in Philly in about 25 minutes... no driving necessary.

The house is more than we could have ever imagined -- in a lot of ways. But we're thrilled to finally have a home we can grow into, rather than the condo we had quickly grown out of.