Thursday, July 19, 2012

Goodbye carpet!!!

The carpet in our house kept looking worse and worse.  But let me tell you - having not one but two babies who spit up all the time made it look completely disgusting.  

This is what it looks like after a year of 2 spitter-uppers
Last fall we kept talking about possibly removing all the carpet downstairs in our house if Justin got an end-of-year bonus or if we got a decent tax return.

In January, we started having an awful problem with fire ants.  In fact, Jeremy got a bite that ended up developing a staph infection.  No matter what we did we couldn't get rid of the ants.  Then we realized that even though we were cleaning the carpets every now and then with the carpet cleaner we had purchased, the spit-up must have gotten down into the padding and it was drawing fire ants in.

Getting rid of the carpet turned into something that we really needed to do and not just something that we wanted to do.

So in March we got rid of all the downstairs carpet (with the exception of our big storage closet that goes underneath the staircase - that stayed spit-up free).  We are so super grateful to those who donated their time, talent and energy to put the new floors in.  One of our friends in particular was definitely the expert and we wouldn't have been able to do it without him, his knowledge, or his tools.

After moving some things out, but before ripping out carpet

Justin and his dad pulling out carpet

Carpet is gone, new padding being installed

New flooring going in

The (almost) finished product
Looks like I don't have any pictures of the family room besides the close-up of the awful looking carpet.  Maybe one day when the house is clean I'll have to take some to post.

To be completely honest we still aren't really done.  We still have some of the finishing work to do - filling nail holes in the quarter round and such.  We haven't really been the type of people that do much work on their home, so we were just impressed that this got done in a weekend!  And when I say we got it done, I mean my mom and I kept all the kids out of the way so the men could work on the floor.

2 comments:

Amy said...

The floor looks beautiful. We have been wanting to add to our existing hardwood and replace some of the carpet, but the bid was really expensive and it's not something we can do ourselves, so we are waiting.

Stephanie said...

Love it! So happy for you to be able to get rid of the spit-up carpet!