Relocating, Remodeling & Readjustments ~ Ceilings and Carpets, and Floors, Oh My!

We had some painters come out the other day to respray all of the ceilings upstairs.  There were a few stains from areas where the roof had leaked before my parents put on a new roof a few years ago, but mostly it was just that as the bedroom furnishings got more and more cleared out, you could really start to see a lot of discolorations.  After 36 years they were really in need of a refreshing.

  This is a before photo I snapped of a portion of my daughter’s room that shows part of the ceiling.  All the ceilings in the upstairs are slanted/angled, but it’s kind of hard to tell from these photos.

And after…So fresh and clean!

The entire upstairs’ ceilings look like brand new!  Makes it hard to wait to paint all the walls now to freshen them up too!

~

But “all in due time, my pretty” because the next thing we needed to do was rip out the carpeting in my mom’s room.  Which surprisingly wasn’t really all that difficult to do.  That’s not to say I’m not completely and utterly exhausted after spending some time “on the floor” so to speak.  😉

But before we could get to the carpet, we had to move the remaining furniture out of my mom’s room which included a couple of very beautiful, but very heavy old dressers.

And that’s where this handy invention comes in.

Pretty nifty things for weak girlie people like me.  You just slip them under each leg of the furniture and they slide it along with ease!  Haha just like it says on the package.  😉~

Okay, so with the furniture out of the way, now we could get down to business.

Because I have asthma and allergies I thought it would be a good idea to wear one of those face mask thingies to protect myself from dying of a dust and debris overdose.  Funny thing is, wearing the thing actually made it more difficult to breathe.  Maybe I got the wrong kind…

My daughter snapped this goofy photo of me wearing it.  I look like I’m getting ready to perform major surgery or something.  “Scalpel.”  😉

~

I took the advice of several people and cut the carpet into smaller, more manageable pieces, and then just rolled it up and hauled it out, worked like a charm!~

Then I got busy on the pad.  That came up super easy.  Why, hello there 1902 hardwood floors!  They looked like they were in fairly decent shape too!

But as I continued pulling back the pad, I saw that there was a bit more going on there than just some hardwood floors underneath that carpeting.  Like left over remnants of some old linoleum…

Yeah… like some really freaking awesome looking old linoleum!  Omygosh I love it!  So much so that I wish the entire floor was covered with it.  I can’t even tell you!  I bet it was really cool when it was new, but I love that it’s all old and worn ~ just adds more character to it.But alas since it doesn’t cover the whole floor, it poses a real problem with making the hardwood look halfway decent until we can refinish it properly.

So my daughter set to work trying to set if it would come up.  And it did.  Not real easily though.

She loves that old linoleum almost as much as me so she tried to take it up carefully to keep larger sections of it intact if possible.

I gave her a wide putty knife and that seemed to do the trick, but it scratched the floor underneath quite a bit.  😦  But it couldn’t be helped.This was the main piece that needed pulling up, but some of the other areas were proving to be a bit more stubborn, so we decided to call it quits on our linoleum lifting efforts for the day and go back to work on it a little later.

I was thinking it might be neat to try to make something out of it.  Like take the intact floral part of the pattern, tear unevenly around the edges, then maybe mount it on something, stick an old beat up looking frame around it, and hang it on the wall as a piece of the house’s history.  Could be cool right?  🙂

~

I worked for quite a while trying to remove the tacking
strips around the perimeter of the room, but that wasn’t so easy either.  I couldn’t get at it with the hook side of a hammer as a friend had suggested I could pull it up with, so I wedged the end of a flat head screwdriver under it and tapped on it with a hammer to try getting it up that way.

But that was brutal.  Unfortunately, the wood just splintered and all I really succeeded at was managing to gouge and scrape up the wood floor.  😦  So I gave up for the time being. I don’t know what I’m going to do about getting those tacking strips up without wrecking the floor.  Maybe I can try calling a carpet place to see if they know of any other tricks I could try.  I’ll definitely be looking around on the Internet to see what can be done too, but I think I may quite possibly be in over my head here.  Wish me luck…

~