Weekday Work

 Our stairway after the carpet was pulled up.

As I've mentioned earlier here we recently moved my mother out of our 1/2 upstairs to her own apartment.  Now that she is gone and the upstairs is empty it was time to start repairing the damage.  Not that my mother was wild and crazy and knocked holes in walls or anything, but she did own cats.  Yup, you guessed it, the carpet completely reeked of cat urine and it had to go before we could do anything else as we simply couldn't breath.  My wonderful husband volunteered himself for the job and spent Saturday and Sunday ripping and rolling carpet.  He stacked all the rolls in our garage to be doled out one at a time to our garbage can.  Luckily we do not make much garbage so there is plenty of room each week for a roll of carpet, and with the temps in the single digits at night it's cold enough to keep the smell down from the rolls left in the garage.  There is a lot of it to be sure, but not enough to warrant a dumpster and the extra expense.

My job came afterwards, that of prying up all the carpet tacking strips and pulling out all the carpet staples.  Not hard or taxing work, but fiddly and time consuming.  We probably could have reused the tacking strips I suppose, but we didn't want to risk having anything left that could possibly smell of urine (we are even taking up a few floor boards from the closet where my mom put their litter box.)  I've been spreading the work out over the course of the week as my hands have been getting sore in the process (I'm sure all the knitting I do has nothing to due with my hands aching.)  With only six stair treads left I'm hoping to finish today which is just in time for the weekend and a new set of repair jobs for us both.