The Slow Teardown
Nothing has made me feel my age quite like the current home renovation project that I'm tackling. For nearly two weeks, I've been ripping up the carpet that has flowed down our staircase since we bought our house, more than 26 years ago. It's seen spills, cat claws, and cat barf, and we should have replaced it years ago. When we decided to tear up all of the carpeting on the second floor, replacing it with hardwood, we meant to do the stairs at the same time. When a flooring company gave us a quote to redo the floor and stairs, we nearly added human barf to the carpet. The stairs alone were going to set us back more than 25 grand. We opted to do the hardwood on the second floor ourselves and we would think about what we'd do with the stairs later. Our work certainly doesn't look professional but we're happy with how the floor turned out . Last fall, we decided that we'd save money and just have the staircase re-carpeted. We found some cat-friendly carpet (th...
