I woke up Saturday morning with an endless list of chores to do, to get ready for our friend's Sara and Carl to come for a visit this coming Thursday. I think I wasted a couple hours in front of the TV stressing about how much needed to be done. I finally got dressed and went out to the garage to gather the weed-eater, gloves, shovel, rake and extension cord...to weed-eat the lawn (again). Once I had all the shit together out back, I figured I better enjoy a smoke before I begin this horrendous chore. As I sat in my hammock my belly said it was lunch time (anything to put off this back aching process). I made myself a delicious cordon bleu wrap and watched some good ol' HGTV while I ate.
This is me digressing....Jory and I have talked about (I may have even blogged about it, but I'm too lazy to go check) pulling up the carpet in our living room and putting in tile. It helps keep the house more cool in the summer, but more importantly the carpet the builder put in is the cheapest carpet on the planet. When we first moved in, we kenneled Jimi and let Mazzy run wild while we were at work. For whatever reason Mazzy would piss all over the carpet in front of the door. We figured she was stressed because of the move and she'd get over it. Meanwhile I'm shampooing the carpet every fucking weekend and the stains won't go away. After trying several different cleaner brands, we simply gave up and figured we'd have to tile sooner rather then later. With the recent influx of visitors, I've told Jory I wanted to pull the carpet up and have bare concrete rather then having people come see dog piss alley. All along Jory has argued there would be plywood under the carpet, I disagreed and said there would only be concrete. This house has no basement, so there would be no reason for plywood, the builders would have just thrown down the concrete slab and built on it. I've threatened to pull the carpet up in the corner to see who's right but never followed through.
Back to where I left off...I took my lunch dishes in the kitchen, turned and stared at the corner of the entry way. You can tell I really didn't want to weed-eat, huh? So I grab some pliers and walk over to the corner. Jory notices what I'm doing and gives me the "go ahead" nod. I pull on the corner of the carpet and TADA...I'm right! Jory surprised me by saying I could pull it up if I want. WHAT? HELL YA! So without further ado...
As per usual, I didn't take a BEFORE picture.
Here's the best I could do...
It only took a few minutes to cut and pull it up.
There's no going back now!
I even got Jory to help!
While cleaning the tiny bit of glue I realized I didn't have all the tools I needed to do what I wanted...so it was off to Home Depot. Three hours later we left the Home Depot and the lights and sky were so beautiful so I took this....
After eating dinner I scrubbed and mopped the concrete, even had the mop bucket explode causing a near flood. After a couple hours of drying, I finally finished painting at 3:30 AM.
The builder had left us touch up paint, I figured the floor would look better painted then leaving it bare. Now I just want to pull the rest of the carpet up and throw a rug down, but I have too many other things left to do, like Clean my house and weed-eat my backyard!
5 comments:
I've done a fair bit of tiling before (our bathroom, inlaws bathrooms) and gotten pretty good at wet cutting. It's really not all that bad, it's just laying it out first with spacers and then putting down the mud and doing it all over again...lol
Just make sure you've got it all layed out first and spaced properly. Get a long level that would cover the entire walkway width to make sure you're level. If you're eventually going to do the whole living room, keep a good straight line to work off of and I would probably do a wood trim with no mud so you can put some down to finish the room.
Excellent! good work! i hate house projects.
Although the downstairs is done, Every weekend we say this is the weekend we'll start painting the upstairs (it really needs it). But we haven't decided on colors yet. We'd like to redo the upstairs bathroom, it's carpeted for hell's sakes!
All the upstairs floors are hardwood. Right now it's all covered with shitty carpet. The wood looks really good where we've peeked under the carpet, but we don't what to pull all the carpet up until we paint though.
We've been doing alot of outside yard work though, planting flowers, pulling ugly shrubs, resurfacing our front patio, installing motion sensor lighting, etc.
It sure beats apartment living...
So far the plan is to tile the living room to match the kitchen and dining, it's all one giant great room anyway. We may pull up the rest of the carpet and paint and live with it through the summer if we can't decide which tile or to tile or not to tile.
Landscaping has to be our next project though, June is coming way too quickly.
I figured you were right. They did the same with our house, concrete then carpeting. Projects suck to get going, but boy are they satisfying when done and done well enough. Haha, I like the simulated pee. Yep you will definitely want a good level for your tile job. Like Jonathan said, it's not too hard if you take all the steps to do it right the first time. :) I have helped my dad with tile, linoleum, and carpetting so I have a little experience with it all. I think I will end up being the last of all my friends to own my a place. I am a fucking credit ghost somehow... I never end up getting any of the credit from loans being cosigned and don't know why the hell none of our joint accounts or credit cards seem to do shit for me but show up for Athena... But at least I don't have bad credit...
And man do you have beautiful skies down there!!!
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