We've Been Floored (And Stapled...)

This is how we woke up the morning after our wallpaper removal:

We decided to sleep on that wonderfully, accommodating air mattress in the middle of our living room floor.  And not gonna lie, it was nice to wake up to non-wallpapered walls.  This was our view:

 

Old curtains aside, the walls look neutral and our floral nightmares have subsided!!  We used this view as the inspiration to start our next day of hard work.  The previous night, after our wallpaper removal & before we inflated the sleeping raft, we did this:

Well actually, we did that as soon as we got the keys...and we also might have done that upstairs in the master bedroom as well.  But needless to say, we looked again just to make sure!  We used our box cutter, sliced into the carpet, and sure enough we saw them...BEAUTIFUL hardwood floors!  Now the full monty condition was not able to be revealed until we ripped the entire thing out, but what we got a peek at was original planks of wonderful that we couldn't wait to get our hands on.  No offense to rose-colored plushness- I get excited when I receive a bouquet of roses too.  But running my toes throughout that rosiness with 40+ years of lived in scent reaching your nose was prime time ready to be retired.  We recruited Sean's hard-working family again and dug our box cutters into the carpet in the downstairs, up the stairs, and onto the upstairs landing.  We pulled up the tack boards and spent HOURS pulling out staples.  What we learned was this carpet was not the first round of fur these hardwood floors had received.  And we had double the rusted, easily breakable staples to pull out.  This required not just hard work and dedication, but serious tools.  This is what Nick brought to day two of staple removal, and this demonstrates how hardcore we needed to become:



 You also are able to get a close up view of the amount of staples that could be found in just the bottom step alone.  You go Nick!!  Here we are eating lunch after our removal.  We are tired, hungry, and sitting on an absolute 180 from what we walked on when we first saw this place. 

After pulling out the staples that lined the perimeter and center of our entire living space downstairs, we moved on to the mother load...the STAIRS.  What I tried to demonstrate in this picture was the amount of staples that violated each outstanding oak plank.  80 rusted staples, at least, in each.  The staples were old, rusty, breakable, and took over just not the tops of the steps, but the front, sides, and under the lip of our almost perfect oakness.  It took four people a full day full of determination, a solo cup staple drop station, and random grunts & curse words to remove every single one.  Because of the breakable state of the staples, the aforementioned tools were necessary to pull out miniscule shreds of poking metal. 

 Every little blue dot is a staple holding down not only carpet shreds, but years of wear, tear, and bad decisions of  rose & avocado plushness. 

We decided to tackle the upstairs landing too... 

 The stair "Dream Team."  By the end of it all, we had a strategic placement plan

to maximize our efficiency.

 

At the end of it all, this was the landing we were left with:

And the new view from the stairs.  Ten million staples removed and clean wood!!

It was a loooong two days of hard work, blood, sweat, and tears.  We were thrilled to see our clean walls and naked floors.  With the weekend coming to a close, we made swift decisions as to what we should get our hands into next before I needed to return to Central PA for work and before Sean jumped into his new job.