Made great progress. Scraped up all of the floor tiles in the Great Room and the hallways and pulled the carpets in two of the bedrooms and dragged the out to the flatbed trailer which is encroaching on the 3+ foot deep level again. It's probably going to be another $100 to dump it all.
Overall the slab floor is in good condition but the concrete guys back in 1969 did a schlocky job of smoothing the concrete. Maybe schlocky is too kind. Maybe crappy is a better word. Where concrete should be floated to a high degree of smoothness, here there are all kinds of divits and lines in the surface.
Plan A was to etch the floor with some interesting lines and patterns and then stain it in various rich dark colors that are pleasing to the eye. Plan B is everything else.
Actually at Lowe's there a pallet of real 3/4" hardwood flooring I keep seeing whenever I walk down that aisle. I finally whipped out my trusty iPhone calculator and determined it would only be about $4000+ to lay that floor. A minor increase in the budget over the $300 or so it might have taken to stain what should have been a flawlessly smooth floor. Still it would look (ouch!)....nice!
Friday - 4/22/11
With face mask firmly in place I finished cleaning up after the tile removal and commenced removing the carpet in the Master Bedroom. It, just like all the other rooms, was ratty nasty but came up pretty easily. The part I hate is yanking up all those carpet tack strips. They don't just come up, you have get down on your hands and knees and pry them up at six inch intervals and then pull the nails out of the concrete leaving a series of pretty bruising divots every six inches. I could leave them or fill them, either way, it's pretty obvious. After the first foot with a screwdriver and hammer, you look at the next 12-24' and suddenly your body starts to hurt.
With that chore completed I moved back to the master bath and completed the process of removing all the nails left behind by the paneling and the sheetrock ceiling. Pulling nails....BORING!!!
I spent the rest of the afternoon going back through the whole place with the vaccum and conducting general cleanup. Some friends are supposed to come by Saturday evening to check out the place for the first time so naturally (though I don't know why) I want to make a good impression.
I'm very pleased to report there are no major issues to confront! It's a stout structure with lots of potential to make some improvements without significantly altering the floor plan. More on that later!
Now it's on to the true renovation process.....the fun stuff.... making changes, the improvements, etc.... Oh yeah....and spending a shitload of bucks. Demolition has been pretty much free. Can't say that moving forward!!
No pain, no gain!
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