Floor Wars III

First, there was the bedroom.

Then came the kitchen.

Now it's time for the dining room. And this time, they're not taking any prisoners.

Floor Wars III: Chemical Warfare.

We've always wanted to remove the carpet from the second-floor rooms. We did the master bedroom almost a year ago (has it really been that long?) and the kitchen floor got redone (or revealed, really) just a few months ago. The carpet's old, red, and badly stained. Running a restaurant will do that. No amount of cleaning would get the big lasagna spills off the carpet. So out it goes!

We took a little peek under the dining room carpet a few months back. We were hopeful that we'd find hardwood underneath, like we did in the bedroom. And so it turned out to be: nice oak planks under the padding and tack strips.

On Sunday Kathy and I took a knife to the dining room carpet and ripped it out in chunks. It was all over in less than an hour. (Hey, we're getting good at this!) But alas, the floor was badly stained; it was even worse than the paint splatters we'd found on the bedroom floor. This one's got big splotches of green adhesive goo. It's the consistency of green Crayola crayon melted all over the wood.

Our trusty eco-friendly orange-flavored stripper hardly did anything to it. It smelled nice, but it just wasn't taking the adhesive off. So we called out the big guns. I got some extra-nasty stuff from "Uri." It comes in cans labeled in Russian, straight from Chernobyl. The fumes make you see things. The can gets warm for no reason. You have to throw the brushes away after 15 minutes. This stuff works.

Even so, it took four coats to remove the larger spills. I put it on, stand back for 20 minutes, then scrape the green mutagenic ooze off into a bucket. Lather, rinse, repeat. I'm afraid to leave it on the bare wood; it'll probably start a fire.

At any rate, the floor is mostly stripped now, as are my fingers. My normally reliable nitrile gloves disintegrated on my hands. I found it's better to work bare-handed, because then at least you remember not to scratch your nose.

Once the evil smell subsides we'll follow the usual pattern: sand, stain, and topcoat. We're going to match the stain we used in the bedroom because we like it and because we want the floors on this level to match. Changing stains between rooms would just look weird. Like having green splotches in your dining room.