Adventures in DIY Flooring - Cutting The Rug I

And now this year's (first?) big house project: replacing that blue carpet we hate so much! The color and wear of the stuff is only part of it. I mean, if this was installed back when this color was popular, it is 30 years old give or take. It's done its job and then some. And by "and then some" I mean that it's done its job and also absorbed some odors including the slightest aroma of cooking oil and cigarette smoke. Like we can't always smell them, but then when we do catch a whiff it sticks with us. Blech. In the main traffic areas the pad is shot, too.

I started the demo in the master bedroom. After getting all the carpet, pad, & staples out of this section, we moved all the furniture back and upended the bed to get that side.

Demo can be very fun in a cathartic kind of way, but tearing out wall-to-wall carpet is not fun in any kind of way. Poor Delia; between all the vacuum-monster sounds and the mama cussing sounds she didn't find it fun, either. She had to come give my neck and ears a very good cleaning while I was sitting on the cedar closet floor with her ears in the worried position the whole time.

Is the photo blurry or is it just air born particulates making it look that way? So much dirt and dust under the carpet pad! And it was so obvious where main walking paths were vs. where furniture was. GAK! Yes, I wore a mask.

We - more Eric than I - just finally could not take it any more. I didn't think we were ready to financially commit to replacing pretty much 800+ square feet of carpet, so I re-visited the projects I'd seen online where people painted and stenciled their subfloor. They could look very nice and not at all like half-arsed solutions. And then I looked into the possibility of DIY carpet binding which actually seemed pretty feasible. Until I priced broadloom carpet remnants, that is. Even the most generic of greige options were pretty costly! In fact, all the options were just variations on generic greige.

The left side (also the back side) is all master bedroom/closet/half-bath. Center is full-bath and hall. Right is guest bedroom and studio/office/sewing room/auxiliary guest room.

So then we decided that if we were going to spend that kind of money for painting and self-bound, boring rugs we should at least look at what the materials would cost to replace the flooring "for real." That's when I drew up that layout on graph paper to email to Doug at the flooring place. I get teased for my proclivity for drawing rooms - and their furnishings - on graph paper, but it works for me and I actually enjoy doing it, so... suck it, haters!

This is the carpet and pad from only the master suite. Without working the numbers, I think it's safe to say that the master suite comprises at least half the blue carpet, though. It is a good thing we started this mess when the wood shed was almost empty!

Just doing the quickest of estimated calculations, I determined that going with Plan A - the filling, priming, painting, stenciling, & sealing and then DIY binding rugs to size could easily cost $1500. It would be dirty work that would take a long, long time with much of that time crawling around on the hard floor. It turns out that was more than half the cost of the materials for installing plank vinyl. This stuff is rated for sound-proofing for multifamily dwellings as well as being waterproof due the core not being made of wood particles. This also means that it has a much greater span capability so there's no need to have transition pieces in doorways, etc. I think it's a fair assumption that this is going to be much faster and easier, as well as a cleaner project and more likely to last as long as we do. 

There were six to choose from at the cost we were quoted. The other three were a narrow plank pattern, so I didn't even bring them home as I knew they weren't right for us. From these three, we both liked A best on its own. However, A was pretty much the one that worked the least with all the other wood tones going on. Both B & C would work, but we like the "saw mark" stuff going on with C and the oakiness better for our house in the forest.

I think I'll start in the guest room, move through the hall to our bedroom/closet/half-bath. After those, I'll likely tackle the bathroom which has the more typical laminate, probably installed shortly before the last owners put the house on the market. Last will be the office/studio/sewing room/auxiliary guest room, which actually has light beige carpet of a similar era instead of the blue and also has the most shit stuff to move. It's also the only room upstairs other than the hall that we haven't repainted and it has some unfortunate fake paneling wainscot in a few, random places along with a mystery chair rail all the way around. I've already started playing around with how we might put the room back together when that's done... probably sometime next winter.

You can sure see the difference between this photo of the graph paper studio and the scan of the graph paper second floor.