Floors from hell

Carissa, Ana, and I spent the weekend over at the new house doing some work. We pulled up the carpet that was in the living room, dining room, and hallways. There was so much dust underneath the carpet that I couldn’t breathe. The smoke smell was awful and when we took the carpet outside to get it out of the house, I nearly threw up from choking.

THere was almost an inch of dust on the floor where the carpet had been, but after we cleaned up the dust, the floor looked pretty decent. There was a lot of carpet padding residue left and I tried to remove that, but it wasn’t coming off.

In preparation for painting, I started washing the smoke-covered walls with ammonia. Very stinky, but it worked really well. The plus side was that when the water splashed on the floor, the carpet padding residue dissolved almost instantly. Unfortunately, some of the varnish came off as well, but we’ll deal with that in time.

Now we have to wash the rest of the walls and remove the tack strips.