The dog peed on the carpet yet again. The kids said "ooh, you get to cut another hole!" I had cut away a corner of the carpet under the piano a couple of months ago when she'd peed there a few times and the smell didn't want to come out despite enzymatic carpet cleaner. And I'd been joking ever since that wherever she peed I was just going to cut more carpet out. So this morning there was a small spot of pee and Chuck is away for the weekend and we were enjoying a day unexpectedly free of scheduled activities. And Sophie and Fiona said "yeah! just cut it away!"So we did. In fact we cut half the carpet away in the piano/computer room. It was not a small job. The carpet is, as I've said before, likely well over 30 years old. It was that cheapo stuff with foam rubber backing rather than a separate underlay. It was not tacked or stretched in any way, so I assumed we could just lift it out and dispose of it. But it turned out that the underlay had pretty much rotted and adhered to the concrete beneath. So we had the smell of rotting foam and a lot of tough manual scraping to deal with. It took quite a while.
The rest of the room will have to wait for another weekend. We still have to wash the concrete we've exposed. It smells awful. It looks terrible. But this is progress.
Spontaneous DIY is my favorite kind. Of course there's always some unexpected complication or condition to deal with...
ReplyDeleteDeborah
Ew, you just gave me a flashback to removing carpet just like that...ancient indoor/outoor carpeting (a lovely green-orange-brown print) with a foam backing adhered to cement. I remember all that icky scraping! Along with some sanding, too, I think.
ReplyDeleteThe good news was that we ended up painting the floor and it was a wonderful change. good luck!
Ohhh, do I see hardwood in your future??
ReplyDeleteLOL, Penelope, dh came home, looked at the concrete and said "ooh, I like it!"
ReplyDelete"NO!" I shrieked, "you can't like it! You've got to agree to hardwood!"
reminds me of the time that my mum decided to see what was under the cracking linoleum in the den. answer: another layer of linoleum dating from the 1920s (when the house was built), which had been glued to the subfloor using glue made of horse hooves. My mum spent a solid week scraping and smelt like manure at the end of every day. But she got hardwood at the end of it all . . .
ReplyDeleteYa know...some good friends of mine live in a ground floor apartment, and experience a flood about once a year (usually from some problem in the suites above them), and after replacing the flooring 7 times in 7 yrs, they finally just painted the concrete floor, and stenciled designs all over it. They did a desert theme, a sandy coloured background with desert flora and fauna (geckos and such) and it doesn't look half bad actually! Rather cold on the feet though...
ReplyDeleteThe worst part about dogs peeing on my carpets and stair runners isn't the pee itself, I find, but the odor! Do you get problems dealing with the odor as well?
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