torley manor

Having successfully eliminated 99.9% of the drop ceiling in our home (there are still 2 tiles in the front “foyer” between our exterior door and our interior door), we are now on a quest to rid our home of the rest of the old beat-up, dirty carpet that was here when we moved in. As stated previously in this blog, its been a bit of a tug-of-war between Emma, who grew up in a house with no carpeting, and myself, who grew up in a house with wall-to-wall carpeting. While I recognize the ill effects that carpeting has on my allergies/asthma, I also realize that my feet like the comfort of carpet.

But in the name of helping eliminate our combined allergies, we have been taking some active steps. This winter we blocked off the forced air vent in our bedroom and heated it with a electric radiator. Tag teamed with our humidifier, this really helped keep our bedroom air more amicable for the winter sleeping. Personally I think it did wonders for my ability to get through winter without any chest colds.

The next thing that Emma wanted to do was get rid of the carpeting. I said “After winter is done” and more specifically recently stated “Once temperatures are regularly 50 degrees and above”. Noting that temperatures for the coming week appeared to be over 50 each day, I suggested to Emma that we spend our Easter removing the carpet.

The carpet in our bedroom was not tacked down, it was merely floating atop the existing floor, so it wasn’t a big task to remove. There was some question as to what we would find below it. We knew around the edges of the room there was the same awful brown tiles that were in our hallway, but we also knew there was a section that was bare floorboards.

The first section of carpet is removed!

After the second section is removed. The first section has been vacuumed and mopped. Note the dusty filth of the second section

Emma gleefully rolls up the old carpet. Good riddance!!

Emma mops the floor. Note the layer of linoleum that covered the section of floor where there was no tile.

After the linoleum was removed.

Now we are tasked with covering up the shitty floor that remains. The brown tiles are glued down on a sublayer that is nailed down pretty extensively, so removing them seems overly time consuming. Beyond that, the pine floorboards underneath are super soft and pretty beat up, so its not like it would be worth un-surfacing the original floorboards. Being that there are some other big budget items on our list of house projects (gotta get that other side of the house re-sided before too long!!), we are trying to re-do this floor relatively on the cheap. Currently we are leaning towards just doing the Ikea laminate floorboards. I think we are gonna go check those out in person tomorrow. We’ll surely keep you updated.