The home I purchased about a year and a half ago is a definite “fixer-upper”, to say the least. It is almost 100 years old and has been lived in by the same woman for the past fifty years. This woman lived here by herself, so she kept the house very clean, but rarely made home improvements or changed anything. In fact, when I removed the kitchen cabinets, I found huge roach nests behind the cabinet walls. It must have been a real mess when she lived here!
One of her favorite colors was pink. I could tell because every single wall and open surface was bathed in some shade of pink – from light pink to dark pink and shade of even fuscia! The only carpet in the house was bright pink and, in my opinion, hideous.
While normally I love a nice carpet, I knew that I could not stand to have her pink carpet in my house. I needed to make a real change if I was going to feel like this house was my own. I called up my girlfriend, who had recently purchased a new house as well. She came over and we thought about what I was going to do with the carpet for awhile.
The risk with pulling up the carpet was that the floor underneath of it could have been badly damaged by the years of using the carpet. The rest of the house was a completely beautiful hardwood floor. I didn’t want to risk having to purchase new carpet to replace the pink carpet when I could just dye the carpet. I had a huge chance to take.
Ultimately, I decided to go ahead and rip up the carpet. I started at the top of the stairs and worked my way down, my friend helping me all the while. I discovered the pulling the carpet up was the easy part. The hard part was still to come.
Because the house was older, when the woman who lived here before installed the carpet, she literally glued the carpet pad to the floor with industrial strength glue. Over the years, the glue set into the floor and became as hard as cement.
I contacted the local carpet retailer near me to find out what to do. I also asked my neighbors what they did with the older carpets in their homes. Ultimately, all I had to do was purchase this extremely strong glue dissolver. I poured the dissolver on the stairs and then scraped it off using a steal scraper. Once I removed the major chunks of glue, I was able to use a steel brush to get right down into the floorboards.
From there, I used a pair of pliers to remove the hundreds of old staples that at been holding the carpet in place. The whole staple removing process took about two straight days because there were so many and they were so long.
Finally, I cleaned the floors with Varisol and a Brillo pad. I stained them the same color as the other floors in my house. I then finished them off with a coat of polyurethane. Now, the floors look wonderful!