The carpet pad didn't tear. It crumbled, like a stale cake, and a little cloud of orange dust came up every time I pulled. It smelled like a closet nobody had opened since the 1980s, which, for all I know, is accurate.
We'd suspected for a year that there was oak under the beige carpet in the upstairs bedroom. The living room downstairs has original oak that the previous owners refinished around 2015, and when I pulled up the upstairs heat register last summer, I could see the edge of a matching strip floor. On Saturday, May 31, we finally found out how much of it was left.
The order we did it in
The bedroom is about 13 by 17 with sloped ceilings and two dormers, and everything in it had to go downstairs first. The bed frame came apart. The mattress went to the guest bed in the office, where we'll be sleeping until the floor is finished. The dresser was a two-person argument with a narrow Cape staircase that I don't need to relive.
After that, the process went:
- Cut the carpet into strips about three feet wide with a utility knife, roll each strip, tape it and carry it down.
- Pull the pad, bag it and vacuum the dust.
- Pry up the tack strip around the edges with a flat bar and a hammer.
- Pull the staples. All of them. Forever.
We wore N95 masks for the pad and gloves for the tack strip, which has nails pointing up and catches anything soft. The shop vac came out for the pad dust, and Moose, who had been supervising from the bottom of the stairs, retreated to the back door and asked to be let out the second it started.
Staples, and the knife mistake
The pad was stapled down every few inches across the whole room. I started counting and gave up somewhere past three hundred. Tessa took the side of the room by the window with needle-nose pliers, and I took the closet side with a flooring scraper that popped them out two at a time when it worked and launched them across the room when it didn't. She was faster than me, and she would like that noted.
My mistake happened early. On the first two strips, I cut the carpet where it lay instead of folding it back and cutting from the underside. The blade went through the carpet and the pad and scored the oak in two places, a pair of thin lines about a foot long. They're shallow, and the sander should take them out, but I felt sick for about ten minutes. After that, every cut was from the back.
What was under there
Oak strip flooring, about two and a quarter inches wide, wall to wall. Most of it is in good shape. There are some dark rings near one window where a plant probably sat for years, paint drips along the walls from when the upstairs was drywalled in the eighties, and a few boards in the middle that squeak when you step on them. The finish is worn through in a path from the door to the closet, which tells you exactly how somebody walked every morning.
The surprise was along the closet wall. Under the pad, flattened against the oak, was a hardware-store receipt from 1961. Handwritten, carbon copy, a quart of enamel, a brush and two sheets of sandpaper, for a total of less than three dollars. The store is long gone. Tessa held it up to the dormer window, read it twice and said, "Somebody was doing exactly what we're doing." It's in a plastic sleeve in the house binder now, next to our closing papers.
The carpet and pad filled the bed of the Tacoma, and I drove it to the transfer station on Sunday morning. The dump fee was $28, which is the cheapest thing in this whole project.
Tessa turns 29 today, and she spent part of her birthday weekend pulling staples, so I owe her more than the dinner I already promised. A floor refinisher who came out last month quoted $1,950 to sand and finish this room. We've reserved a drum sander and edger for Saturday, June 14, instead. Until then the oak is bare and dusty and a little scratched where I was careless, and I've walked upstairs twice tonight just to look at it.
