When we moved to Louisville we decided not to move into our room until we took the carpet out or we’d never do it. The previous owners stapled down some fantastically ugly carpet over hardwood floors, which I’m sure was cheaper than refinishing the wood before selling. I prefer scuffed and scratched hardwood over cheap, depressingly dark carpet every single day. Javi spent an entire afternoon freeing the carpet from the staples in the floor, then we rolled it up and sliced it into smaller pieces that he’ll eventually use to cover his future-workshed. We spent all of Valentines day crawling across the floor removing hundreds of staples with pliers and scraping paint off the wood with a utility knife blade. Romantic!

above: pre-paint job w/ carpet

The wood is in fair shape but the end result is a far cry from the dark, rough carpet that was there before. The wood floors brighten up the room and maybe we’ll get around to refinishing them someday, but that isn’t not even close to the top of our list. Once we rid the floors of the staples and scraped off the paint I washed the floor a couple of times while Javier went to Lowes to pick out floorboard trim. He got medium density fiberboard (MDF) trim – it’s the cheapest kind and looks great. Once it was all in place we moved our furniture in – all in (mostly) a day’s work!

above – with the trim in place. You can see the floors are scuffed and scratched with a huge water blemish by the window, but they are a beautiful color! 

The next step is to rid our guest room and office of carpet – and now that we know it’s a job that can be done in a day it doesn’t seem so daunting. It’s also amazing what a difference this makes in a room and all it cost us was the price of the (very cheap) trim. Hopefully the wood floors in those rooms are in decent shape as well – especially since our previous owners didn’t think it necessary to cover the floors with a drop cloth while painting since they were planning to cover them up with carpet. Scraping the paint off is a bear. We have to hurry and get it all finished before Javi goes back to work…7 days!

scraping paint – a little shot of before and after. JUST USE A DROPCLOTH! 😦 

Before and after side by side – unfortunately the before is more of the walls because it was meant to be a before / after of the first and second coat of paint, but you can get a rough idea of the ugly carpet. Huge difference!