The Shop Floor: Removing the Carpeting

I wish that we hadn't gotten rid of the carpet.  I am not sorry that we had taken it out of the basement, because we had to, but I wish we would have kept it and found a way to use it somehow, because it was a really nice carpet.  Really nice.  It was a little older, but it was a high quality product and it was like walking on a comfortable gym mat without all the dried wrestler sweat and shoe marks.  I would have liked to use it somewhere in some capacity or at least found someone who could have used it because it really was pretty nice, aside from the cat puke stain and paint flecks we let get on it because we knew it was going away.

     As it were, we had determined early on that the carpet wasn't totally glued down all throughout the room, which was a really good thing because that would have caused a ton of extra work.  One of the things about doing a tile floor on existing cement is that you can't have any adhesive or paint on the cement because it effects the bonding of the quickset that holds the tile to the floor.  So had the carpet been adhered at spots all around the room there would have been a lot of scraping to be done.  The easiest way to determine this is to go to a lot of random spots around the carpet and trying to lift it up.  if it lifts you are in business, and it is okay if it sticks around the edges. 

The basement before carpet removal.  Notice the painting is done and we allowed paint to spill on the carpet because we knew that we were going to remove the carpet.

     Removing the carpet was easy, okay?  Really easy.  I just started in a corner and I began pulling.  That's not true.  I actually began in the hallway because that was the one place where I needed to make a cut, and to be honest I screwed it up.  I cut with a straight edge exactly along the place where I wanted the carpet to stop and the floor to begin, which was right under where the door would be.  Wrong move.  I am not going to include this in the "lessons learned" section because it is a small thing: cut it so there is more carpet than you want, because you don't know what is underneath and you can always trim some.  In my case, I cut it a little bit short and I found out that I just missed a joint in the tacking strips, which would have been the perfect place to cut it.

The hallway: where it all began.

But I cut it.  I used a normal, everyday utility knife, what I grew up calling an Exact-o knife.  And I went slowly because I didn't know what I would fine under the carpet.

     What I found was all the signs of professional installation. The carpet itself was covering a typical carpet pad, the kind that is sort of mottled and doesn't even come out cleanly.  The carpet was held down by some of those wooden tacking strips with a million billion nails facing upward so that the carpet weave just sticks to them, and the strips themselves were nailed into the concrete with those masonry nails that are installed by essentially shooting them into the concrete with a .22.  The pad was inside of the strips and was glued down to the floor just around the edges.

A couple of images of what I found under the carpet.  In the top photo you can clearly see the carpet, pad, and tacking strips.  Below, a close up of the strips showing the heavy-duty masonry nails.  The duct tape is where there is a cut in the pad from when it was originally installed, but you can see in the top of the bottom picture that my cut missed the joint in tacking strips by an inch or two.

     What really made my heart sink when I ripped the first bits of carpet and padding up from the hallway was that the floor was painted.  It was painted with the same thick grey paint that covers the floor in my laundry/utility room, and I was not impressed.  The problem is that the quickset mortar that one uses to attach tile to a concrete floor generally doesn't adhere well to paint.  One of two things usually happens: either the mortar won't adhere to the paint, or the paint flakes off the concrete eventually so the tiles don't set right.  There are two ways to remedy this situation: lay a cement-board floor over the existing concrete, or completely scrape and sand the paint off.  I was not looking forward to that, because I didn't have the cash on had to get the relatively expensive cement board, and I didn't feel like being on my hands and knees scraping the entire basement.

The painted hallway floor, with carpeting still on the floor in the main room.

     So that is what I found, and I immediately began to remove it, and this is where I sort of have some regrets.  In order to make it easier for me to remove and haul away, I decided to cut up the carpet into squared and bind them with twine or whatever.  I wish I would have just rolled it up and found a use for it, or saved it for another time.  That is the deeply repressed hoarder inside of me peeking out, I guess.  Anyway, I cut the carpet into squares, pulled them off the tacking strips and floor, and ripped up the padding underneath.  The padding, where it was glued down, stuck.  But under the bulk of the room was a nice surprise: an unpainted floor.

In the process of removing the carpet, notice the carpet, the pad, and the bare floor with no paint.

     That was big.  I found no paint.  What I hypothesize - and there is no real way to test this - is that at one time the basement was configured differently than it is now.  Currently we have a main room into which the stairs and the outside door lead, and then looking at the stairs to the left there is a utility and laundry room where the furnace, water heater, etc. is located, and to the right there is the above mentioned hallway, which leads to a bathroom and a non-bedroom (because it doesn't have an escape window).  I believe that the "bedroom" and bathroom were later additions, and that historically the basement only had two rooms - the main finished room which today is the shop, and the a giant utility room that took up half the basement.  Hence the fact that the paint stopped at the end of the hallway.  I was relieved.
    What I did find in lieu of paint on the floor in the main room was a very evident pattern of squares - 12" by 12" - the exact size of the tile I was to be putting down.  I told Jim about it and he asked if the pattern was in a sort of yellow looking stuff.  As you can see in the photo below it clearly is.  He told me that there was probably asbestos tile down there are one point, and what I was seeing was the leftover bits of the underside of the tile and the adhesive used to adhere them to the floor.  Take a look:


The pattern on the main room floor, showing where there used to be asbestos tiles - which was common for the age of the house.



    The next big issue that I had, once I started pulling up the carpet and pad, was the tacking strips the surrounded the room where the carpet used to be attached, and the pieced of pad that were still sticking to the floor.  Getting the tacking strips up was easy enough: a pry bar wedged under them with a hammer usually broke them up and they came right off.  But the nails wouldn't come out.  You can usually break those nails off right at the floor with a small sledge hammer, or even a regular hammer, if you hit them just right.  Usually.  Well, this house seems to be unusual, and I guarantee you that I wasn't hitting them right, and the first couple that I tried resulted in big chunks of concrete coming up with them.  So I just borrowed an angle grinder from Jim and ground them off - over a hundred of them - down to level with the concrete.

     The pad that was stuck to the floor came of even more easily with a simple scraper, and the scraper did the trick on the bulk of the rest of the stuff on the floor.  The scraping was the longest part, in fact.  I spent three nights after work scraping on that floor, and I still didn't get it as clean as I wanted it.  But it was doable.  The paint proved to be the hardest: parts of it flaked off with no problem, but I wasn't able to get most of it off before I ran out of time.  I decided to take the chance that the paint was adhered well enough and that there was enough of it removed that the tile would stick.  I was out of time, but the carpet was removed.  My Dad would arrive the next day to lay the tile.  But that is for another post.

The Shop Floor: Introduction

enemy (n):
1. One who feels hatred toward, intends injury to, or opposes the interests of another; a foe
2. Something destructive or injurious in its effects

                                                                              - The American Heritage Dictionary

    The shop floor is my nemesis, plain and simple.  I hate it and it hates me.  As one of the requirements of the State of Wisconsin to operate a tattoo parlor, there has to be a hard surfaced floor.  Carpeting is not allowed.  So I decided that to save money and in the spirit of fixing and improving my own home, I decided that I would lie a ceramic tile floor in the basement.  In the sense that a nemesis is one who feels hatred toward or intends injury to something, I am the nemesis of the floor because I want to break it all and I hate it every time I see it.  In the sense that is it destructive and injurious in its effects it is my nemesis because it haunts me day and night and every time I go down there.
     Now granted, I spent a lot of time, effort, and frustration over the course of many days getting a little more intimate with the floor than I would have liked to, so I tend to look at it with an overly critical eye.  I look at the floor and see every flaw, and I am sure Traci does too, and I am sure you would if you installed tile for a living, or you were looking at buying the house (which won't happen - I won't allow that house to be sold with that floor in the basement), or maybe if you were just a jerko you might notice the same things, but most of the people who come through there aren't looking at the floor, and the ones who are seem to say that it looks just fine.
    In truth, I was in a little over my head on this project.  But I learned a ton in the process, and with what I know now I would do it over for sure, or do it again in another room for sure.  But we will get into that later.  For now we will just go through the process of how I went about it (with help from my Dad since he was unfortunate enough to offer) and then at the end we can talk about what I learned and what advice I would give.  But for now we should just start at the beginning, and that beginning is with removing the carpet.

Lessons from Painting

    One of the key things about living life in today's society - well any society - is to make sure that you learn lessons from the things that you do, so you can do them better in the future.  Like when you make a pizza and it comes out more done on the one half than the other, you need to learn the lesson that your oven doesn't heat evenly and you should rotate your food halfway through.  Or perhaps when you are a caveman and you kill a buffalo you learn that hitting him with a spear in one spot kills him really easily, you need to learn the lesson that that is how you kill a buffalo without getting gored or maimed or exhausted or whatever.  That's evolution.  So let's take a look at some of the lessons I learned from painting the basement, and what advice those lessons would lead me to give to you.  Some of these things are going to seem like they are elementary to you but I didn't know them so I am telling them to you anyway.  Take that.

- Take your time and be very thorough with your prep work.  I am sort of ashamed to admit that this is one area in which I skimped when I was painting the basement, and I am paying for it to some degree.  We sort of rushed things into production and went through the prepping very quickly and as such missed some things.  For instance there were some holes that we missed filling, which wouldn't be such a big deal except when there are holes drilled in paneling there tends to be a little mound of material that builds up around the hole, and those needed to be sanded down and the holes filled.  Also, there were some areas around the window and door that once had plastic on them, and that clear adhesive tape that they use to stick the plastic to the wall was still there.  I didn't notice until it was too late, and now that there is paint there it is very noticeable if you are looking.  So I would advise to take a lot of time to make sure that your prep work is done completely and done well.  Also, make sure you take a lot of pains with your drop cloths and move as much furniture out of the room as you can.

-  When painting paneling, sand the paneling before you paint.  I am serious.  I know that they do wonderful things with paint chemistry these days.  I really do.  But the bottom line is that paint - no matter how technologically advanced - still needs something to adhere to.  It still needs some sort of texture to bond itself too, and paneling is just too smooth.  I would advise at least lightly sanding and paneling that you might have to paint and then making sure you wipe it clean before applying paint.  I did not do this, and as a consequence whenever I scratch against the wall the paint just comes right off and you can see the paneling underneath.  The layers of paint adhere to one another just fine, but the first layer just can't seem to stick to the paneling when under duress, and it has lead to some annoying repairs and ugly marks.

-  Beware the grooves.  The grooves on the paneling cause a lot of problems.  First of all, they are deep so you can't get in them well with a roller.  Second, they are textured when the rest of the paneling is not, so it takes more paint to get in there and get a nice even coat than it does to do the rest of the wall, and it makes it just a pain in the ass.  Also, it is really easy to miss parts of the grooves or paint the grooves unevenly, which leads me to...

- Don't divide the work.  I know this sounds stupid, but hear me out.  Because the grooves in the paneling are such a different animal, it is really tempting to assign one person to paint them all in and another to swoop around with the roller.  That is what we did.  What happened then was that I went with the paintbrush putting a heavier coat of paint in the grooves and giving it a brush texture while Traci went the other way around the room with the roller doing the surface of the paneling with a roller texture.  What ended up happening was that I had by necessity laid a thicker coat of paint than she did and the wall ended up being striped when you look at it very closely, especially because we used a light colored finish coat.  If you want to divide up the work, make sure that the roller person follows immediately behind the groove painter, because the roller will even out the paint and give it an even texture.

- Tape.   I know that taping sucks, because it takes forever, it doesn't always work right, and sometimes it takes off the paint underneath.  I get that.  But it is important.  We decided not to tape and even though I used a straight edge the lines aren't always straight, they certainly aren't even, and there are places where the trim paint got on the walls.  So take the time and make the effort to tape, especially when you are doing painting inside, because it is probably going to get more scrutiny.


-  Don't brush too much.  I have a nasty tendency to get a little overexcited with the brush or roller, and all it does is thin out the paint and make it uneven.  When it looks good just stop.


-  Slow down and pay attention.

     So that is about it.  That is mostly what I learned, and I will definitely put those things into practice when I do my next painting, which will be some trim around the baseboard (because of a floor project that we did) and eventually the outside of the house.  If I could do it all again I would and I would definitely use what I learned.  But we live and we learn.  And I hope you did too.

Painting the Basement

      I know that it has been a while, but I have been busy with the holidays and a number of projects, the first of which we will chronicle here today.  Traci and I have been busy attempting to presto change-o a basement living room into a fully licensed, fully functioning tattoo parlor in which she can work, with mixed results.  She received her license to operate the shop earlier today from the Vilas County Health Department, so I suppose that in the long run it was a successful renovation, however it didn't quite go as planned.  The first order of business was to paint.
      Part of the reason that we decided that we needed to paint the basement - hereafter to be called the shop - is because regulations require walls with a light surface, and the 70s or 80s era paneling that adorns all the walls of our home just don't fit the bill.  Since we are operating on an extremely limited budget, we decided that the best course of action would be to paint the paneling.  The room began looking like this:

The original basement...as brown as brown can be.  Notice some furniture just scattered about.

     As you can see...it was not very exciting.  Brown paneling with like a sandy pinkish-brown trim.  I am not ever sure how to describe it, but it wouldn't work.  The ceiling is actually just about white and the carpet is more green than it looks in this photo.  But that is the space that we were working with, in addition to a little hallway that is off to the right of the photo.  There were lots of holes in both the trim and the walls from removal of the trim where nails pulled through, or from pictures and other things being hung on the wall.  So we filled those areas with wood putty and sanded them down.

That is me putting putty on the trim in the hallway.  I need a bigger shirt or a judicial robe I guess.

Some of the repairs where the walls had been sanded.  I know, it's a little hard to see.

    Now they make special paint that is made just for going on paneling, but it is expensive and can be hard to find.  I can't attest to how it is supposed to work, because we didn't have it.  What we did have was some Dutch Boy primer AND some Dutch Boy paint that was supposed to be self priming, which we thought would be enough.  I briefly, on the night we were preparing to paint, considered sanding the paneling to rough it up, because the main problem with painting paneling is that it is completely smooth and shiny and there really isn't anything for the paint to adhere to all that well.  But I decided to put my faith into the paint and off we went.  The other problem with painting most paneling is those stupid grooves, because they are deep and they are textures so they soak up paint like it is going out of style.

Traci putting the first passes of the roller to the wall.  We started in the middle because that is where she happened to be standing when we started.

In the process of putting on the first coat of primer.

Traci applying primer under the watchful eye of our job supervisor...Felix T. Cat.

     Traci went with the roller, while I was assigned the job of filling in all the cracks with the paintbrush, and for whatever reason we went in opposite directions.  Tomorrow we will talk about the lessons I learned while painting and why that was a bad idea.  But anyway, we made okay time and got most of the room painted with primer in one evening.   As you can see from the middle photo above the paneling was really showing through the primer, with stripes where the grooves were, so we decided to put a second coat of primer on to try and even out the base, since we were using a light color for the finish coat.  We also chose not to prime the trim since we thought the paint would adhere to that with no problem.  Below is a picture of the room after the primer was done being put on.

First coat of primer.

Second coat of primer...it looks much more even.

     Now you may have notices a couple of peculiar things in the above photos.  First, if you look very closely in the second photo you can see that we splashed lots of primer on the trim.  We would continue that trend when we did the top coats because the trim color was a little darker so we thought it would cover it up with no problem...and we were right.  You might also notice that there are no drop cloths on the floor to cover the carpet.  That is because the carpet would be going when we did the next project so we weren't concerned about keeping it nice.  To be honest I sort of regret that decision because someone would have taken that carpet off our hands if we had kept it nice.
     Anyway, with two coats of primer on and a couple of days to dry we were ready to start with the top coat.  We made up our minds early on that we would do two top coats to make it even and make it last.  The color was a sort of blue-gray-ish off-white.  I am sure there is a name for it that only females and interior decorators know, but I don't, so I choose to call it be the most hyphenated name of all time.  Blue-gray-ish off-white.  It is a light color though, and gives the room a much lighter feel.

Putting the first finish coat on the walls.  You can see it looked good over the two coats of primer.  We would eventually put a second coat of finish on as well.

     I am not going to bore you with a bunch of painting pictures, because you have all either a.) painted or b.) seen someone painting.  Besides, it is pretty boring.  But I will tell you that I also painted the ceiling, which sucked because it involved me standing below it craning my neck and arms upward for like three days.  And the results were hard to see:

If you really try you can see the color change in the two photos, with the new color on the left and the old on the right.

And I will show you a picture of the room once the top coat was on:

The painting really changed the look of the room...didn't it?

And it met with the approval of my supervisor.

I really think he was just there to huff the paint fumes.

     Anyway, it was onward to the trim.  For the trim we had another blue-gray type color, but it was a little darker.  I will warn you that in the pictures it is kind of hard to see the difference; it is much more noticeable in person.   The painting of the trim took forever because there are so many trim pieces all around the room.  This is because of the paneling, which necessitates trim on every corner, whereas with drywall they can just mud it nice.  The painting of two coats on the trim went pretty much like the other painting did, just with a lot more attention to not getting it on the rest of the walls.  It also included painting all the doors, which we had taken off their hinges or tracks with the exception of the infamous pocket door.  There were two sliding closet doors, one louvered door, one side of the bedroom door, and one side of the pocket door.

Painting the trim without primer.  Notice the subtle difference between walls and trim colors.

The doors sucked up a ton of paint, and the louvered door (leaning against red cloth) was especially difficult.

      Painting the trim actually took a long time.  It was two coats, much of it was up high, and there was a lot of it.  But in the end the paint job looked okay.

We left the closet doors off because we knew we would be tiling the floor soon.  They would normally be covering the shelves at the left of the picture in the hallway.

     Except it didn't quite look okay.  I wasn't happy.  Now I know that you can't see it in the pictures, and that the average person won't see it, and that I have an overly critical eye towards the paint job because I am me and I spent a lot of time down in the shop staring at it.  But that is not the point.  I can honestly say that I could have done better.  And should have done better.  There are a lot of spots where I got some trim on the walls, like right around the edges.  There are also a lot of areas where there are drips on the walls from uneven application of paint.  You can also see stripes along the grooves in the right light at the right angle if you are really looking for it.  There are areas on the trim where the old cantaloupe yellow is showing through the two coats of paint I put on.  And, to top it off, there are areas on the doors and walls where the paint has scraped or rubbed off and you can see the paint or paneling underneath.  And we will talk more about those problems and how I would have stopped them in the next post.  But most people won't ever see or notice any of those blemishes, which is good.  So I guess you could say it looks hooker good - good from 20 feet but a lot scarier close up.  HAHAHAHA!  But seriously, it is done and it is serviceable, and it is time to move on to the floor.  But that is for a later time.  First we have to talk about what we have done and how we would have done it differently.  Until then, we hope all is well.  See you next time!