The time had come to roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty and start this much-talked about basement renovation. When we bought the house, the whole basement floor was covered with a light blue carpet. The carpet wasn’t in unreasonable shape, but it did have a few unfortunate stains and didn’t really correspond with the look and feel that we are going for in our basement. We wanted something that was not just more aesthetically pleasing, but also easier to keep clean and in good shape. First up? Ripping up carpet and tile.
The carpet was super easy to rip up. Dan cut the carpet into reasonably-sized sections with a utility knife and then ripped it up quickly and seamlessly. There was a thin wooden edging around the perimeter of each basement room (this is what the carpet was stapled/nailed down into), so we pried each of those pieces up and carefully threw them out.
Next, we were down to the tile. Oh, beautiful, multi-coloured, old tile. In our fancy get-up of plastic coveralls (we anticipated this being a messy job with lots of dust), we got started with the more challenging part of the demo. With our handy scraper tool (you can find them at Home Depot for around $45) we developed a system: Dan would scrape the tiles up and I would follow behind picking up the removed tiles and putting them in the trash. Since the tiles broke up into many small pieces, this was a pretty long job – some rooms having easier tile to pry up than others.
After a good day’s work, it was done (and oh boy did my legs feel it from that perma-squat and dan’s arms feel it the next day..)! Although it looks dark and dreary down there now, and we have about 8 industrial-sized garbage bags full of tile pieces, we are thrilled to bits with the progress.
Stay tuned for what’s up next!