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Browsing Tag: #hardwood
My grandmother built this house round about 1960. She had beautiful #1 hardwood floors put in. After a time, she decided they weren’t worth the effort to maintain (she was under the illusion you had to buff and wax them on the weekly) and had them covered up with some truly horrendous mustard colored carpeting. When she died in 2008, my first priority was getting that God awful carpet ripped up. A friend helped me with the biggest part, and I was tasked with pulling up all the staples and nails and cleaning the wood from all the bits of carpet cushioning before putting down some nice area rugs. This was a JOB. I did it all with a claw hammer and my trusty needle nose pliers. I love needle nose pliers. Some staples came up easily, some I had to really fight with. And a very small number got left forever because they weren’t coming out, no way, no how. And once that was completed I went over it with a paint scraper, then some sort of cleaning agent, THEN the floor polish. Three bedrooms and the hallway is what I slaved over. I had to get done before my furniture was delivered so I worked way into the night through the week and every moment those two weekends to get finished in time. And it seems like I had to get my library painted too. And the walls had to dry. I had fans…
November Writing Challenge, Day 6 The carpet. The carpet was ugly, and it would have to go. The sooner the better. The living room carpet had long since been torn up and thrown out, exposing golden Clear Grade oak hardwood flooring. It wasn’t beautiful and perfect anymore, though. After almost 40 years of being suffocated by a truly hideous parade of carpeting ranging from a puke green to what was once a burnt orange shag, the hardwood was marred by spots where the rubber backing had stuck and countless staple holes. But it cleaned up okay, and until I could afford to have it refinished, it would have to stay. Strategically placed rugs were lain. The first rug was almost as bad as the carpet-a blood red rose design knockoff Oriental that what it lacked in beauty made up for in size. But it would have to do. I had been promised that the hardwood floors ran the length of the house, except in the kitchen and bathrooms. I was fixing to find out. Next was the bedroom I was taking over, due to it having an en-suite bathroom. I had stayed in the master bedroom for years, but there was no discernable difference in size. The closet was the main attraction in there. I enlisted some help and it didn’t take long to rip the decades old carpet out. We got the hallway while we were at it. Indeed, the same hardwood greeted…
