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Technically, this is day 5 and 6, but screw accuracy - I just want to get this done! Thursday morning, 7:00 AM - today is Carpet Installation Day (1 of 2). I got up and got going. Some last minute cleanup scraping. Then the vacuuming. I tell you, it's amazing how much a carpet-less room echoes and how much noice the carpet normally dampens. My ears were absolutely ringing from the noise of the shop-vac. It took me until 8:30 to clean up all the crap. I did find out that the particular tool I used (not the crevice cleaner, but the next size up) actually worked really well because it could be used to scrape and suck of the pad at the same time. Not as good as scraping with the sidewalk scraper, but handy for those spots I missed. I thought I would have plenty of time, but I was racing the clock to be done for 8:30. I didn't want to be half done when the guys got there to install. I just made it by 8:30.
I needn't have worried. They didn't show up at 8:30, or 9:00, or 9:30. At (;45 AM I finally called and asked if I had the correct day (just imagining the annoyance of a mixup and finding out they were planning on coming next week). He claimed they'd be there in 10 minutes. He was correct (not too tough since they are like 3 minutes from our house). I guess they were a bit late getting started. So, two guys show up and I show them the place. I told them I had done my best to take up the old pad and they said I had done a "beautiful job" (and I'm not just saying that). My guess is that if they had been paid $250.00 to do it, they would have convinced us that the old carpet was a much better pad, or just left the pad half of the under-carpet where it didn't come up. They set to work and, in no time, had the pad down. One went to work onthe stairs while the other did the floors.
They finished about 2:30 PM. I had offered them some lunch, water, juice, cookies, etc, but all they took was some water. They asked if they could leave the carpet for the master bedroom upstairs since only one would be back the next day and it would save him dragging it upstairs on his own. I was happy to oblidge, but it was actually a pain in the ass because we needed to move all the furniture into the small bedrooms to tear up the master bedroom. As it turned out, I moved those rolls of carpet four times before I was done. They also left a strip of carpet nailed down to keep the stretch until they had the master bedroom to attach it to. It was right in the middle of the hallway, but I tucked it under the old carpet so as not to trip over it and all was well. As soon as the guys left, I snapped some pictures and uploaded them so Zoe could see (she was at work).
I then went to work dragging furniture out of the master bedroom. It was actually quite an impressive pile of stuff. We packed most of it in the yellow bedroom, and put our bed and the recliner in Boo's room. Boo got to sleep in his room twice while still in the womb. Then to work on the master bedroom. I ended up deleting the pictures of it in progress (more of the same scraping and ripping) because I thought I needed the space to take pictures at Andy and Lisa's wedding (which was incorrect as the batteries died instead and I never did use up all the pictures). Suffice to say, I got it all ripped up and started vacuuming at 9:30 PM, and finished vacuuming at 10:20 PM (again, sorry neighbors). I dragged all the carpet out to the curb and then collapsed. I had had enough. I missed what happened on Friday, because Zoe stayed at home while the guy came and finished. It took him most of the day. When I got home, we had entirely new carpets everywhere. It looks and feels great. And, believe it or not, the garbage men came and took everything. It was a lot of stuff to take, and I would not have been surprised if they had only taken half. I was hoping they would take it as I know someone who threw out two decks (yes, the wooden things attached to the house) over the course of a month and they never balked at taking it. Billerica garbage service rocks!
Well, in hindsight, it may have been worth $250.00 to have someone else take up the old carpet. I'm glad that we saved the money and did it ourselves, but it was a lot of work. I guess if you figure it was about 8 hours work altogether, that's about $40.00 an hour. I'll consider that paid to ourselves for the work, so I don't feel so bad. I certainly would not blame anyone for paying to have it done. But, most people probably would not have to scrape their entire upstairs floor inch by inch. I can imagine staples might have been a pain as well, but certainly more tedious than brute force. On the last section of the last room, I finally found the best strategy. It was to simply drag a section of under-carpet up (don't worry about the pad left behind) and then scrape. Sure, it was messier than doing it the methodical way of scraping down the entire length, rolling the carpet back a bit and going back down the length. But, it was definitely less back breaking.