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.