Laying a Brick Paver Patio

One of the projects I've had on my list for the past year was to put some of my old brick pavers to use (the ones that were pulled up in the backyard when I landscaped) and build a nice, small patio to store my garbage bins on. One of those projects that is boring to everyone else, but has made me so happy ever since I finished it.

Repurposed, used brick pavers make for a cute patio.

Previously, the bins rested on a bed of jagged little landscaping rocks which are not only ugly, but they were difficult to roll the bins on and off of and even worse, so many huge ugly weeds sprout up through the rocks. This is one of the few times, and it turns out the ONLY part of my house, that I don't have a before picture of.

How to Lay Pavers - The Non-Professional's Guide
This is the "I just need it to function" method. If I were serious, I would have made the ground completely level and used string and sticks and levels to make sure. And used something to cut a few bricks to size so my border doesn't have a gap at the back.

Instead, I worked off memory from a 3 part YouTube video I watched over a year ago on how to lay brick pavers and decided to see how it went. Because it was just too hard to spend 5 minutes watching the videos again.

Step 1: Prep Work
I paid my landscaper to dig out about four inches of dirt and rock because he does a good job of eyeballing level. And I learned when I had to dig a hole to bury my cat Boo that I hate digging.


Step 2: Lay Bricks
After I had a level, clear areas to work in, I poured about a quarter inch of landscaping sand (about $3/bag - I needed 6 bags for my roughly 5x7foot area). I didn't do it all at once - I just poured a little bit for the immediate area I was working on b/c it's nicer to work with while it's damp. Yes, it comes out of the bag damp. And yes, I'm just now realizing as I type this that I could have used the hose to re-moisten it if I had poured more.

Next I laid a border with my larger 12x12 pavers, tapping each into place with a rubber mallet.

Then I figured out a simple pattern for the brick sized pavers, again, using the mallet to tap them as close together as possible.

Last, I put a border around the border (see pictures) to try and hold everything in place.

Click to enlarge - left side has sand in
the gaps, right side still needs sand.

Step 3: Add Sand
The final step is pouring sand into all the gaps and using a broom (and my hands) to brush it into the spaces between all the bricks. I did this twice - I noticed after a day that the first round of sanding had settled and I had more gaps again.

Step 4: Curb Appeal
Ok, that wasn't the FINAL step. The final step was putting mulch/tanbark around the border b/c I didn't build all the way to the fence (because my landscaper didn't clear that far).

The final product:

It's done! I really like how the aged and used bricks look.

The brick patio at work - a nice home for all my garbage bins.

Total Cost: About $20 for bags of sand and $11 for a rubber mallet. Materials were free, however if you have to buy new pavers, these are about $.60/each.

Amber vs. Dishwasher Installation

I had absolutely no idea how to install a dishwasher. But since I was replacing an existing dishwasher with a new one, I figured all the hard work has been done and I just need to pay attention to how the old one is hooked up and mimic that for the new one.

I now know how to install a dishwasher; next time I will pay to have someone do it for me.

After updating my kitchen cabinets last month, I decided a new stainless steel dishwasher would look much nicer than my existing black one. Plus it gets moldy inside. That could be because the dishwasher is old, or it could be because there's no air gap (what's an air gap?) through the sink which I found out from Home Depot is required in California. Luckily by installing my new kitchen faucet along with the dishwasher, there is now an air vent because I no longer need a hole for the pull out sprayer.

Old dishwasher and faucet

I did a lot of looking around at all the major appliance websites, Sears, Sears Outlet, Home Depot, Lowe's, and looked at the websites for several local dent & ding wholesales places. I ended up returning to Home Depot to buy the first dishwasher I saw and liked that was near my $500 budget. There are really nice ones if you can pay a few hundred dollars more, but I'm single and don't even run my dishwasher once a week, so I don't need a mega-washer. I did however want one with a stainless interior. Just as extra precaution against mold and stink on the inside.

I bought the GE Adora Dishwasher in stainless steel because I liked that it had hidden controls and a stainless interior. It was on internet special over Labor Day weekend for $538 (from $699), plus they have free delivery and haul away. The Adora series is exclusive to Home Depot and pretty new so there weren't many reviews, but my research enthusiast friend Sara checked with her Consumer Reports subscription and confirmed GEs have good reviews and I liked them better than the Maytags I looked at in the store (those tend to be the two brands that offer a lot of models in the lower-end price range).

How To Install a Dishwasher
First, let me state that the paragraphs above were written 6 weeks ago. I only now have just completed installing my dishwasher - and not because I procrastinated! I've literally had to do this in phases every 5-6 days and have probably spent about 10 hours on this project if you include all the trips to home depot. Knowing what I know now, I wish I had paid the $80-100 to have a professional do this. But there was something in me that wanted to prove I could be handy. What I'm wondering now, is just who I wanted to prove that to? My cat Jackson? There's nobody in this house who cares if I do things myself or pay someone to do it.

 My cat Jackson. Not impressed by my handiwork, but a fan of the new area rug he can lounge and scratch on.

That being said, here's how you install a dishwasher, assuming you are replacing an existing one:


Removing the Old Dishwasher
The only tool you should need is a screwdriver and possibly a wrench. You'll also need a bowl.

1. First, pay attention to how things are hooked up (I took pictures, which is good since I worked on this for so long, I forgot how it was originally set up)
2. Turn off the water supply to the house
3. Unplug dishwasher from the outlet (assuming yours has a plug and is not hard wired)
4. Place a bucket or bowl under the areas where you'll be disconnecting pipes.
5. Disconnect the drain tube (mine was attached to the garbage disposal, but if your dishwasher is hooked up properly, yours should be attached to the air gap up by the faucet holes)
6. Disconnect the waterline (on newer dishwashers, this will be a flexible tube; on older models, like mine, it will be a thin copper pipe). If this is connected extremely tight, you may need a wrench to loosen. A little water will come out. 
7. Grab your screwdriver and unscrew the bracket mounts from under the countertop. These are located above the door.
8. Pull the dishwasher out from under the cabinet. 

I think step 8 is supposed to be easy but in my case this is where one of my big hangups was. I tugged and pulled and the dishwasher wouldn't come out. I thought maybe it was stuck b/c it was lower than the tile on the kitchen floor. Then after letting it sit for a few days, I realized I might be able to tilt it back a little bit so I could lift the front legs over the tile lip. Well, I could tilt it, then I was able to adjust the height of the front legs and was able to pull the dishwasher out. I did a jig, then used my He-Man muscles to carry the dishwasher outside.


Installing the New Dishwasher
So the manual with your dishwasher will explain how to do all this. It will arrive screwed on a pallet to keep it stable which you'll need to remove before installing.

1. Test the door and adjust the springs if it is too stiff or loose
2. Remove the dishwasher from the pallette (you'll need a wrench)
3. Attach the water line and drain hose
4. Attach the electrical cord. I had to buy the GE standard electrical kit (about $5) and connect the electrical wires to a cord with a 3 prong outlet. Apparently dishwashers can be hardwired into the wall.
5. Adjust the dishwasher legs if necessary so you can slide the dishwasher into the cabinets
6. Your dishwasher cabinet should have two holes into the sink area - one for the water line and drain hose and a second to run the power cord through. Thread everything through the appropriate holes and slide the dishwasher in (haha...I wish it had been that easy for me! Much fiddling and fighting with the leg heights
7. Once in, use a level to make sure it's level from front to back and side to side
8. Now connect your water line to the hot water pipe under your sink
9. The drain hose should connect to your air gap (many YouTube videos on this) and then you need to connect the airgap to your garbage disposal with a heavy duty black rubber pipe (I don't know what it's called, but if you don't already have it from your old dishwasher, they'll point you in the right direction at the hardware store. It was about $4). You'll probably have to cut the pipe down (another hangup for me).
10. Now you're done. Turn the water supply back on, filler 'er up and cross your fingers that nothing leaks when you press start!

Reading this, you'll see the steps are relatively simple. I just kept running into small issues along the way and getting fed up and taking 4 day breaks. BUT, I now have a new dishwasher that is so much quieter than my old one that was at least 10 years old. I can listen to the tv without having to crank the volume and close the door to the kitchen (In two years, I only washed dishes while I as at home twice because it was so loud; typically I ran it when I left for work).

Final Before & After
This is my kitchen the day I moved in:

And here is my kitchen today:

I'm still impressed that just changing the cabinet color suddenly made the peach counter and backsplash cute. Or maybe my mind is just playing a trick on me so I don't try and update that too.

No More Free Shows Through the Kitchen Windows

My breakfast nook has four wonderful windows that let in a ton of sunlight, which I love. They also look straight into my neighbor's kitchen and one looks onto the street = free show for the neighborhood when I feed my cat or make breakfast in my underwear. Well, after two years, I decided the free shows are over. It's time to put up some curtains.

I found some adorable, simple cafe curtains on Etsy.com (shown below). They were white flour sack material with red rick rack trim (zig zag ribbon for all the laymen out there).

But at $40 a pair it was going to cost me $160 for all my windows. Mama wants to buy knee socks and tights for winter with that money, not curtains!

I figured I've got to be able to make these myself for a lot less.

I figured right!

AND - I could make them without sewing, which was key.

One, I don't have a sewing machine. Two, I took sewing in 8th grade, but I transfered in from a different school halfway through the semester. So while everyone else was ended the class by a skirt or other article of clothing, I only got as far as making a pillow. Granted, I probably don't need much more sewing skills than that to hem a curtain.

How to Make Cafe Curtains Without Sewing
What to Buy:

• 30in x 30in white flour sack kitchen towels. Target sells packs of 4 for about $3 each. I needed two packs for my windows. You could buy an extra pack to make coordinating hand towels if you want.
• Rick rack trim. This is at any fabric store and comes in a variety of sizes, colors, and lengths. I opted for large canary yellow and bought one 9 foot spool for $4.
• Fusable Tape. I bought a brand called Steam-A-Seam 2 in the the 1/4 inch size to work with my trim, about $3

Total supply cost for 8 curtains: ~$15 with tax.

Make the Curtains:
It's so easy, it's almost not worth explaining!

1. Iron the towels 
2. Lay out a strip of the fusable tape along the bottom edge of the towel (I placed mine two inches from the bottom)
3. Cut an equal length of rick rack and lay it on top of the tape 
4. Place the iron over the trim for 10 seconds to fuse the tape to the ribbon and towel
5. Done

It took about half an hour to make 8 and cost me more to buy the hardware than to make the curtains (3 cafe rods and 5 packs of clip rings, also from Target, about $5 per rod and $4.50 per pack of 7 rings).

The Final Product:
It's pretty rewarding to make things, which I don't do often, and even if it was super easy.

Painting Kitchen Cabinets Pt. 3: Before & After

First the answer to what everyone wants to know: how much did it cost and what do I need??

Supplies and Cost
I had 23 cabinet doors and 7 drawers and two very small portions of wall to repaint.

• Paint (2 gallons semi-gloss, plus samples) - $70
• Primer (1 gallon, oil-based) - $22
• Brushes (Purdy) and Rollers (smooth surface) - $28
• Wood filler, small tube - $4
• Painter's tape - $4
• Medium Grain Sandpaper - free, already had
• TSP cleaner - free, already had
• Cabinet pulls (35) - $90
• Screws (the ones that came with the pulls were too short) - $7
• Hinges (23 pairs) - $78
• Shelf liner (3 rolls) - $22
• Brush cleaner - $8
• Cleaning cloths - free, already had
• Tools needed: screwdrivers, drill, orbital sander, hand sander, putty knife

Total cost: ~$335

How to Paint Cabinets
As I mentioned in my first post about this project, I read this blog to figure out what I needed to do. Now let me tell you what steps were involved

1. Remove all doors and hardware
2. Remove old contact paper and wipe down shelves/drawers
3. Clean cabinet doors with TSP
4. Fill old handle holes with wood filler (only necessary if your new pulls are a different size)
5. Sand cabinets with medium grit paper to remove finish and smooth wood filler
6. Wipe sanded cabinets twice - once with dry cloth, once with wet cloth
7. Prime everything (I used oil based primer and a roller)
8. Lightly resand to fix any rough spots or strange roller patterns left by the primer
9. Paint cabinets - I did the backs with a high quality roller and did the fronts, which have a lot of details, with a large paint brush. I did this b/c when I primed, I saw the roller left a lot of strange marks and wanted to avoid that with the actual paint.
10. Let doors dry for 4-5 days until they aren't tacky, then install new hinges and rehang. I type this like it's easy - rehanging was the most difficult part because I bought new hinges. Even though they were the same size the doors did not hang exactly right. My neighbor Matt saved the day and did this part for me - THANK YOU MATT!! The trick ended up being some creative screwing of the hinges on the door (the top hole needed to be at an angle) to get the hinge flush with the door edge. Then when he attached them, he only screwed them into the base about 98%. If you screwed them in all the way, it shifted the doors over an 1/8 of an inch and they wouldn't close right.
11. While the doors are drying, measure and cut the new shelf liner and install
12. Install new pulls
13. Wipe down cabinets and touch up any paint nicks

Originally I was going to tell you all exactly how long this project took, but that was when I was under the impression I could get this done in 6 days over two weekends. WRONG. It took me a month. I stopped keeping track at 16 hours, but will put this at about 30 hours of work and lots of trips to Home Depot. Anybody else notice you can never just go once a day? I always end up there twice. Always.

Kitchen Cabinets: Before & After

Ok, now for the goods! Here is how my kitchen used to look

 

And here are my newly painted cabinets. The white cabinets actually make the peach tile look kind of cute. I certainly don't hate it as much now. And the green lower cabinets with the hardware make the peach feel a little art-deco. I decided to do the lower cabinets a color other than white because the floor tile is white and I just felt it would look to sterile and institutional if all the cabinets were white as well.

The upper cabinets are one of Behr's whites, I forget which, but it's in their Light and Whites booklet. The lower green cabinets took longer to settle on. After 6 samples of various shades of light green, I settled on Martha Stewart Artichoke Heart, but color matched and mixed in Behr paint.

I repainted the walls with some leftover Restoration Hardware Cappuccino from my living room accent wall (also color matched and mixed in Behr). I had a  really hard time figuring out what color to paint the wall since white and green are really the only thing that go with peach. I had found a nice rose pink that would have worked but I was concerned it would make it too girly. Then I remembered I had about 10 different colors of paint in the garage from painting the rest of the house 2 years ago and this light brown worked out nicely.  

Hardware Details:
Door pulls are Stone Mill Satin Nickel 3-ring Cabinet Knobs which I purchased from Overstock.com (I had O rewards which is why I paid less than the listed price)
Drawer pulls are Stone Mill Satin Nickel Nantucket Cup which I also purchased from Overstock.com
Hinges are 3/8 offset satin nickel. I bought mine at San Diego Hardware but they have them at Home Depot as well.

 

Next Project 
Other than the cabinets, there are two things I've detested about my kitchen since I bought the house: the kitchen faucet and the appliances. Or rather, the dishwasher in particular b/c it's black and because it gets moldy inside. Yuck! I can't update all my appliances right now, but this week I'm going to buy a stainless dishwasher. I think it will look really nice with the new hardware and paint. And it won't be loud or stinky.

I already bought a new, tall faucet with a pull down nozzle this weekend so I hope to get that installed this coming weekend. Once these things are done, my updated kitchen will go a long way towards making my like my house again. I haven't been very happy with it for the past year, mostly because I'm embarrassed by my front yard. By then end of this year, I'm going to get it landscaped, even though I hate how much it's going to cost =( But at least I'm no longer embarrassed by my kitchen!!

Final After Pictures (December 2011)
This post gets a lot of traffic (apparently lots of you are researching before and after painted kitchen cabinets - I know I did!). Well, it bugs me that this post has the picture with my old dishwasher, so here's how the kitchen looks after I finished installing the dishwasher and new faucet):

Final After picture with painted kitchen cabinets, new dishwasher and new faucet. Ta-da!

Painting the Kitchen Cabinets Pt 2 - Cabinet Removal

Here was my game plan for the kitchen cabinet project:

Round 1 (Thur-Sat, an hour Th, a couple hours on fri, then the rest sat afternoon/evening):

• remove doors/hardware
• clean
• sand (to remove the polyurethane coat)
• prime

Round 2 (hopefully sun):

• paint (2 coats, but I don't plan on painting the cabinet interiors)

Round 3 (the following sat&sun)

• put down contact paper
• install new hardware
• rehang doors

I'm naive. I thought removing the cabinets and the hardware was going to be easy, if a bit monotonous. I actually thought I could get all 20 doors removed in an hour last night. I grossly underestimated.

Actual cabinet doors removed: 11
Actual time spent: 1.5 hours

Remaining Cabinet doors: 9
Remaining hardware removal from doors/drawers: 40 hinges (or put another way, 120 screws) and 25 handles (or 50 large bolt screws)
Time remaining: I bet it's more than an hour

Stupid screws. And I only would have been able to remove the lower ones had Adam not given me his ladder when he moved to Australia. Thanks Adam! I tried doing the upper cabinets with just my little IKEA step stool, but reaching above my head to remove super tight, semi-stripped screws was not working. Thankfully the ladder gave me the leverage I needed, but my arms and hands just couldn't take doing all 20. Not to mention, every time I was on it, just on the second step with one foot on my counter, my brain was half occupied with thoughts of the ladder collapsing and me breaking various bones. I have decent balance and am probably less clumsy than your average person thanks to volleyball and surfing, but I swear, you raise me 20 inches off the ground and all of a sudden I get locked knees and my legs are shaky from the effort of trying to hold myself still.

So instead of taking one night to get the cabinets down, it will take two. I'm doing it manually with a screwdriver because it didn't look like a drill could reach the screws on the hinges (TIP: I switched to a short neck screwdriver, it's about 3.5 inches long, and it makes getting the tough ones out much easier!). Plus me operating a drill is about as successful as a dog opening a jar. I just can't do it. Which friend am I going to pay low wages to help me rehang them because that will require drilling? =)

I got half the cabinets down!

Needless to say my planned schedule is already shot since I overlooked little details like: how much a screwdriver hurts my hands after an hour, the fact that I have to fill and sand all the holes left by the screws, and how long it'll take to hand sand the archs and edges on the doors (at least I have Adam's hand sander for the flat stuff). I'll be lucky if I can even get to priming this weekend thanks to the hardware!

In the meantime, my cat Jackson is enjoying the open access to the lower cabinets which he likes climbing in the back of (he does it when the doors are on too, using his little nose to work the doors open. Yes, that means there is cat hair on my baking pans. And yes I rinse them before I use them. Most of the time...)

And for anyone concerned, don't worry, I numbered my doors and made a map so I piece this puzzle back together correctly!

Happy Birthday America and How to Fix a Doorbell

Techincally 4th of July is over. But I JUST remembered that this is the anniversary of the night my first apartment that I lived in on my own was broken in to. While I was home. It happened at 1:30am on 4th of July (well, 5th of July by then). I wish I hadn't remembered this. I've been sleeping fantastically and until tonight, hadn't had a single night of being scared or anxious.

How to Fix a Doorbell
But enough of that. Today I figured out how to fix my broken doorbell. It's wireless and I figured the batteries in the receiver were dead, so I took a quick trip to target to buy some C batteries (and hangers and contact paper). I love that I now live close to things! I can get to Target in 4 minutes and I don't have to deal with all the stupid traffic that I used to have to endure when I wanted to go to the one in Mission Valley.

So I get home with my batteries and swap them out then carry then try the doorbell. No sound. So of course I push the doorbell about 20 more times. Still no sound. I pull the back of the receiver again and stare at the wiring and circuit board because if I started at it long enough, I thought I'd magically understand how it worked. I didn't. But it did occur to me to check the actual doorbell button.

I found my flathead screwdriver and pried the button off the door jab. A small task, but I'm always proud of myself whenever I figure out how to do anything that requires a tool. Turns out the doorbell button has the tiniest battery I've ever seen (23A). The C's in the receiver were dated 2004, so it's safe to bet this one was that old too. So I called the Radio Shack that's also about 3 minutes away to confirm they were open and had that battery, then picked it up, came home and installed it and ta-da! Working doorbell.

I also unpacked the kitchen and organized the garage a little today. Still have a long way to go, but now all my surfboards are somewhere safe AND easy to access, I can move around the garage, all my planting pots are organized, and I labeled all my Christmas and Halloween storage bins.

I didn't do anything for the 4th today bbq or fireworks-wise. Just spent the day alone alternately organizing and working on mock ups of a web site I'm designing for my friend. And napping. Now I'm watching Rosanne - it's such a good show. It really was an accurate depiction of working class families. I was going to go to bed, but I've made myself anxious about the break-in anniversary. Grrr....

Yesterday I met two of the guys who live in the house across the street. I'd seen the garage open earlier in the day and saw they had a bunch of surfboards. Then when I was in the front yard getting my board together while I waited for a friend to pick me up to go surf, one of them came over and talked toe me about surfing. I met Brian and Ben but didn't get to talk for more than a mintue before my ride showed up, they seem nice though. So far, all my neighbors get a thumbs up!

How To: Remove Wallpaper

I've never removed wallpaper before. I don't think I've ever even lived in a house that has wallpaper. Although I have to say that thanks to Design Sponge, I'm becoming a fan of wallpaper. I always think of ugly, tiny flower patterns when I think of wallpaper, but it turns out now you can find really modern, hip patterns by companies like Madison & Grow (right) and Graham&Brown (left). I like the idea of using it for accent walls or instead of contact paper in cabinets, drawers, and closets.

But back to the How To portion of this post...

First, My Wallpaper
Apparently I was the winner of the wallpaper-over-wallpaper lottery in my house. Under the faux pink marble wallpaper in my kitchen and breakfast nook, there was the ugly, tiny flowers pattern I'm familiar with. And the faux marble wasn't full sheets of paper, it had been torn into roughly 12x12 squares and given a "rough edge" treatment, then layered one on top of the other. Great. So everyone had me scared about removing wallpaper and how difficult it usually is. How you'll start to pull up a piece and then it will just stop coming off. And with my treatment, it would probably be even harder.

So I read up online to see what I'd need and gathered my tools:

• Wallpaper Scorer($8.50)
• Wallpaper glue remover - I bought "Chomp!". It's new and the guy at Home Depot said customers had been saying great things. ($7)
  
• Paint scrapper - metal ($8 - I've used this for a lot of different projects already)
  
• Paint scrapper - plastic ($1)
  
• Needle nose pliers (I ended up needing these to grab at tiny strips that stuck near the window panes and for stuff that was stuck behind the chair rail dividing my room) (free b/c I had a pair)
  
• Dish sponge with rough scraper side

Ready, Set, Remove!
I approached my first section of wall paper with dread. I started by the door where some was already peeling, got an edge up and sarted pulling. And it came up so easy! Both layers came off together. The only parts that were difficult where when I'd get to the edge of a new sheet of the original paper (the flowered paper on the underneath the layered marble). But even that was pretty simple. Sometimes I'd use my fingernail, but using the metal paint scrapper was quicker, get it under the edge to pull it away from the wall, then back to pulling it off the wall. I didn't end up needing the wallpaper scorer - sweet, I get 8 bucks back from Home Depot!


It took me about two hours to remove all the wallpaper from both rooms. Not bad! Next step: remove the glue backing still stuck to the wall.

Removing the glue turned out to be really easy too. Just soak the wall with the glue remover (Chomp! comes in a spray bottle so application was easy). I started at the top of each wall and soaked sections roughly 2x2 feet at a time. You can do more, but you just need to make sure you get it off quick or it'll start drying.

Let it sit for maybe a minute, then you can pull the backing right off with your hands, and it usually comes off in full sheets or at the very least, really large chunks. Then I'd take the plastic paint scrapper tool and scrape of little bits that stuck by door and window moulding. And the final step was to wipe the wall with some water (I did this after I finished each section).

How To: Remove Carpet from Hardwood Floors

Today I got my keys! After work I went over to my house (note it is no longer "the property", it's MINE) to get started on some work. Sara, Adam, and Stephen were all coming by later to check out the new digs, but I had an hour to kill before they showed up. So I decided I'd go to town on the bush that's growing out of control and blocking the front door and the tree branches that hang really low over the driveway and scrape my roof when I pull in.

The ridiculous, overgrow Front Door Bush, which blocks my breakfast nook window and, more importantly, the path to my front door (this picture is actually a month old, so it was worse today):
So I got all ready to be handy and do dirty work, grabbed the super hedge cutters I borrowed from Adam, and attempted to go to town on the bush ("that's what she said..."). But the bush was stronger than me and the dull, dull, dull shears I had borrowed. Any branch that was the size of my pinky was impossible to cut! So I did what I could until Sara could arrive with reinforcements.

My friend - and now neighbor! - Matt scooted by (literally) during a break from working on refinishing his cabinets to come see my new house and while I was giving him the tour Stephen showed up and Sara and her boyfriend Jason shortly after. After commenting that he'd build a mini-ramp in my backyard because it's so trashed, Matt left to get back to his work and the rest of us got busy pulling up the carpet in my living room to get to the hardwood (after Sara took care of my bush problems).

My living room before.

How To Remove the Carpet
I've been dreading the moment of pulling up my carpet and getting to the middle only to find a huge stain. So we start pulling up the carpet. It's pretty easy, all you need are gloves, needle nose pliers, some sort of crowbar or lever and a hammer. And something to put all the carpet staples in. We grabbed a loose corner and started peeling back the carpet and the layer of padding between it and the hardwood. Luckily they hadn't gone crazy also using glue to adhere the carpet padding to the floor. I was worried about that.

After we got the carpet pulled up and shoved to one end of the room, Sara and Steve started removing the border the carpet had been tacked to by using the crow bar to pry underneath and then lift it up (the border is attached by short nails that pull out of the hardwood floors pretty easy). While they did that, Jason used the pliers to pull the hundreds of staples that had been used to attach the padding to the floor.

Meanwhile, I gave a tour of my house to Adam, Kara, Erika and Jerry who had all shown up when we had about half of the carpet pulled up. By the time I was done giving the tour (I'll have a picture tour for you tomorrow), they had all the carpet up and most the border removed. Man, this home improvement stuff is easy! (just kidding - THANK YOU guys for being such awesome cheap labor!)

Sara and Jason left after about 2.5 hours. We were probably 80% done by then. Stepehn and I finished removing the last of the staples, rolled the carpet into the corner, and swept up the floor. My floors turned out to be in pretty great condition! There are some water stains here and there, but ain't no thang. I don't feel like sanding and refinishing, but I might just refinish. I need to research this process. First I just want to clean them with, as Steve kept saying, Murphy's, and see how they clean up.

Stephen showing off our handy work and playing a little broom guitar.

The one bummer is that the alcove of my living room (you can see it on the right in the before picture) turned out to be an add on. It doesn't have hardwood, just plywood =( So for now I think my "solution" will have to be to get a piece of reminant carpet that doesn't want to make me throw up like the current carpet, and leave that area covered and put a transition tack down. Right now the original carpet is there; we cut it and left it in place while we pulled up the rest of the room. I'd love to put in wood, but I just don't think I can afford that right now.

After toasting our work with a cupcake nightcap with the delicious Eclipse Chocolat cupcakes Erika and Jerry brought me, Stephen and I called it a night around 10:30.

Tomorrow: sanding, priming and painting doors and trim while I continue to ponder what color to pain the living room.