It started out innocently enough. We asked each other, “Who spilled something on the floor?” After a couple days, it still wasn’t drying, so we got the fan out and tried that.
The rug was soaked through and the carpet under that.
After a few more days, we finally realized. There was a leak in the hose.
See, when we bought the farm, we inherited a porch that had been enclosed, converted into a room. We guessed the reason: there’s not a lot of play space in our little house, and in the winter, things can get cramped. But we love our outdoor lifestyle so much that we were willing to compromise. We decided to restore the porch. (SCF fans may remember of the work, some of which we chronicled here: Renovations on the porch.
We hadn’t get tackled the floor, though, because of the three layers of carpet covering it. First, someone GLUED red carpet tiles DIRECTLY to the wood. Then someone covered that with a carpet pad and wall-to-wall carpet. That was blue.
It’s a mess, and we were worried what we would discover when we pulled it up. Would the wood be rotted?
But today, our hand is forced.
The carpet was soaked through to the tiles. Mold was going to be a problem. And the wood, if not damaged before, could become damaged by wet carpet on top of it. We got busy.
Pulling, scraping, scraping, pulling. The black crap is from the bottom of the red tiles. It’s foul.
What a mess.
We decide to cut our losses, literally, and cut the carpet at the point where it was still dry.
Our plan now is to scrape the rest of the floor, sand it down and stain it a nice dark color.
We’ll probably get a few area rugs, too, because it’s nice to have something soft to walk on when you’re out there barefoot.
It’s going to be a big job.
Stuff does not want to come up. I hate people who make bad home “improvement” decisions. I hate the 70s.
This is where we’re at now. I’ll update you when there’s more progress.
