One Step at a Time

It seemed so straightforward at the time. Kathy and I wanted to remove the indoor/outdoor carpeting from the front stairs before the painting started. The carpet was getting a bit old, it was gray, and it just didn't look very nice. Better to paint the steps, right?

That's  how it always starts. In reality, the carpet was really hard to pull off. We must have spent more than two hours just pulling little strips of carpet off, piece by piece. It was glued down very thoroughly, and there was no way to get a good grip on it. We'd peel back one corner and try to pull, but it just wouldn't come up. We tried grabbing it with pliers, shoving pry bars under it, and using a knife to cut it into little strips. In the end, we just brute-forced it, pulling the stuff up in rough, irregular pieces. Yuck.

And after all that, what do we get? A really ugly set of stairs. Even after getting all the carpet up, it still had glue all over it, which just wasn't coming off.

We noticed that the painters were in no hurry to strip it, either. They'd find almost anything to work on before getting to those stairs. Now that we're more than four weeks into the project, they're almost out of excuses and the guy who drew the short straw has started stripping off the gunk. As of this morning, he's been through five 1-gallon cans of Jasco stripper, and he's still not done. I predict two more gallons to go.

After saturating the glue with Jasco, he scrapes it off, waits for it to dry, and then sands it down to the wood. Not the most fun he's ever had, I'll bet. But at least the wood underneath is solid (with some exceptions) and should paint up nicely -- in about six months, when he's finished.