Hasta la vista, baby!

For the most part, it's always a joy when I come home and John(who gets home an hour before I do) has done something exciting with the house. One day, it's replacing the toilet seats, the next, it's ripping up the carpet in the master bedroom. For those of you who have wanted to do this before, here are a few pics to help inspire you:

Make sure you use the right tools. Our carpet was the original from when the house was built(about 11 years old), therefore it was (and still is) quite dusty and dirty. These three guys are essential.

Ripping up the carpet is the easy part(especially if you're a muscle man like mine is)

Little tip: make sure that you know where the local dump is, or whether your regular trash guys will pick it up or not. Thankfully, getting rid of ours was easy, but we didn't think about that ahead of time, and it did have to sit in our garage for a day or so(not a pleasant smell).
This is the hard part, which I will have to get John to share more tips with you since I wasn't there for it. Isn't he amazing? This is no small room we're talking about. And, If you have back problems, I don't think I'd recommend this for you to try.

And this is our new carpet & smell-free room. See all the grey? Yea, that's leftover dirt. Super gross. We highly recommend a shop vac. Ours is a 9-gallon Ridgid, which you can find locally at Home Depot(or Craigslist, as we did) . Those things are amazing!

Now, here's the thing. After ripping out that carpet, and realizing what a big mess it makes, how you are the one who has to haul it away(unless you have teenagers or someone who owes you a favor), and how you can't really live in the room unless you replace it, we know that we've got to have a better plan for ripping up the rest of the carpet AND living here at the same time.

Thankfully, due to the smell of that room(tip: don't smoke, especially not inside your bedroom), we are already bunking in what will one day be the office, so this really isn't a problem for us right now. However, if you're thinking about doing this, make sure that you have your plan B ready to go in case you're not able to put carpet down right away.

Due to the bad shape of the carpet throughout our whole house, we are planning on ripping it all up(yikes!) after we finish painting all of the carpeted rooms/hallways. So, it's going to be a while. But, our goal is to let Lowe's install it for us when the time comes. They seem to be offering a great deal right now to install carpet in all of your house for only $97 buckeroos. Sweet! Now, obviously there are a few things to note here: 1)You have to buy both the carpet AND the padding from Lowe's 2) You have to have EVERYTHING moved out of the room, including all of the carpet, ahead of time. They'll charge extra if they have to do anything except install. 3) Beware if you have stairs. They charge extra for that, too. 4) ...not sure yet. I'll get back to you once we do some more investigating.

So, that's the latest for now.

Adios!