AC Capehart/Floor Journal (Day 2)

Created Sun, 06 Oct 2002 02:58:08 +0000 Modified Thu, 14 Oct 2021 14:31:47 +0000
761 Words

Day 2. (AC, Eve & Tom with moving help from bk and CJ) Well, we just completed day 2. It feels like we’ve made a lot of progress, but what remains is still fairly daunting. Today, we finished moving the remainder of the furniture to storage, and started ripping up the carpet. The carpet itself came up quite easily. The padding underneath was glued down around the edges, and the carpet was pressed into tackboard around the edges. As I said, the carpet came up easily. The tackboard was a bit of trouble, but pry bars and jimmies brought it up fairly easily. Some places, the concrete finish popped out with the nails that were holding the tackboard down, so there are some holes along the wall.

The padding also came up pretty easily, but it had to be scraped up along the glue lines. Both carpet and padding reeked of cat urine. I was sooo happy to be tossing them into (or next to) the dumpster at Store-It-Right. The cat pee had soaked not just into the carpet, but also into the padding. Not just into the padding, but into the tackboard around the edge. Not just the tackboard, but the very concrete slab itself in the cat’s “favorite” corners. It had discolored the tackboard — turning the wood blackish. That same blackish decayed look had permeated onto the slab.

Once all of the carpet, tackboard and padding were up and disposed of, we swept it up to get rid of all the nails and other larger obstacles.

We then went to Sunbelt rentals to see what we could get to sand the surface clean with. They said that the sanders they had were just for wood, and wouldn’t really do any good on concrete, but they had this odd device that I’m calling a scraper, for lack of a better name. So, $124 later, I had one for the day. It had 2 rotating columns with 4 blades each. The blades were supposed to ride on top of the concrete, but clean up paint, glue or any other debris on the slab. After hanging plastic over the kitchen pass-through, the entryway between the den and the dining room, and by the stairs/entry hallway, we fired this scraper guy up to see what it would do. It did help, and I think for the most part it did smooth stuff off, but there’s still a lot of “character” in the floor. Further, it wouldn’t get but within about 4 inches of the side of the device, so 4 inches from the wall. Needless to say, much of the carpet glue stain, most of the cat stain, and most of the paint overspray from the walls is within that first 4 inches out. Tom tried his palm sander to no avail in one corner, but thinks a belt sander will take care of it. I’m going to call Dad (I meant to do that tonight, but noticed it’s past 10:30) and see if he will come up and help since he’s got a belt sander.

Like I said, it feels like we made a lot of progress, but there’s still quite a bit more to do. I re-watched the Kemiko video today. It’s better than nothing, but not nearly as informative as I’d hoped. The next two steps can happen in any order, but they are cleaning up those last 4-inches next to the walls, and laying out and scoring the lines into the concrete. The scores shouldn’t need to be deep, just enough to change the surface, but the diamond blade looks like it’s going to set me back around another $100. And I can’t decide about my willingness to burn up my own saw in order to make progress through the project in the timeframe I want since Joe won’t be available until late in the week. Further, I assume my own cuts will be pretty straight, but that Joe’s could be straighter.

Summary: Excited but daunted still.