I've learned a lot about waste management over the past several weeks, and luckily, Montgomery County seems to have a fairly robust system. Since the municipality collects the trash where I live, residents are also allowed free access (under 500 pounds per load) to the transfer station, or what I affectionately refer to as "the dump." Therefore, poor Bertha (my Jeep) has been taking weekly field trips there to offload decades-old carpet and other miscellaneous "treasures" I've found around the house. If you're in the mood for a relatively dystopian experience, I highly recommend visiting your local transfer station - if you do, let me know if you also feel like you never want to purchase another item ever again.
Unfortunately, the home is fairly saturated with a cigarette smoke smell. Therefore, even if I were a carpet person, the existing carpets had to go in order to start making the space livable. Getting the carpet itself up was actually a pretty fast process, but pulling the approximately 500,000 staples out of the subfloor afterwards was not so great. However, that was a task that allowed me to sit down and play the radio in the background, so it certainly had a redeeming quality! The final step was hammering up the tack strips, which wasn't too bad after getting into a rhythm. Lesson learned on taking out the tack strips is to use a mallet with the crowbar (as opposed to a hammer), and definitely get some good ear protection - it luckily didn't take too long to figure that one out, but I could have avoided one headache had I known ahead of time.
With the carpet and padding up, the smoke smell is starting to become less intense. However, I still have a lot of work to do! Below are a couple of the "before and after" shots that gave me momentum to keep going and finish up the carpet phase.
Comments