Goodbye 80's carpet, hello hardwood!

Probably the only thing more boring than ripping up carpet is reading a blog post about ripping up carpet, but since I am a woman obsessed here is the play by play on how we did this. I don't have a before picture of the carpet prior to it being ripped out because I was at Home Depot, purchasing a paint samples when Bill pulled it up (convenient, I know!) But here is a picture of the carpet in our carport. I'm sure the neighbors love us. As you can see the carpet was a lovely shade of dusty rose and featured a marbled pattern in the pile. Yuck!

Underneath it we found a few surprises, one that the house used to have a faux fireplace,

and the bedroom had underlay glued to the floor and then half scraped up at some point, when I assume the previous owners decided it was too much work and carpeted over it again.

We were hoping for the best when we pulled up the carpet, in the living room with the exception of the area that used to be covered with the faux fireplace all we had to do was pull staples (my job) and removed the carpet tack boards (Bill's job). We are looking for a retro fireplace mantle to put in place of the old one, but for now we will just move our couch over top. Problem solved.

The glue was another issue though, we ended up sanding the floors down with a square sander rented from home depot and then used a belt sander for small bits. The glue came pretty good but there are still a few black bits that even a wire brush couldn't get. We'll address that situation by strategically placing furniture over top of those parts. Bill did all the sanding, it was a long and sweaty day for him.

After we sanded we stained the floors Colonial Maple it was the closest match we could find to our original floors. I did the staining and after few coats it turned out pretty good.

Our stain featured the lovely Lady Varathane.

Wonder how she stained the floor in roller skates?

Here is a much less glam version of Lady Varathane.

Personally I think the unwashed hair, rubber gloves and knee pads make the look.

After staining the floors we did a top coat of high gloss varathane which stunk so bad we decided to come out the the Crowsnest Pass to stay with my parents. I'll be posting the after pictures in a few days.