If I ever hear a real-estate agent say, "You just need to pull up the carpeting" I do believe I will run many miles in the opposite direction.
Just kidding. Maybe.
I expect the root of my problem with pulling up the carpeting in my in-laws' house was two-fold:
1. In my 64 years on the planet I'd never pulled up carpeting before, and
2. On my first try at it I had to pull up carpeting that was almost as old as I was, though the
problem wasn't so much with the carpet,
Anyway, while Tom and I scraped and swept Tommy traversed the perimeter of the floor pulling out the nastily-spiked tack strips that held down the carpeting and yanking out the zillions of randomly and wantonly-placed padding staples scattered around the floor area. Tommy imagined that the contractor who put down the carpeting 60 years ago must have brought his kid along with him then gave the whiney, restless kid his staple gun to keep him occupied and said, "here, go around and staple down the padding for me." And now we were paying the price for a kid gone nuts with his dad's staple gun. Or so we imagined. |
We met up with Andy in the nearby town of Highland Heights at Crostatas Pizzeria, a popular family-owned Italian restaurant,
By the time I returned to the house it was late and our long day - which began for Tom, Tommy and me with our 3-hour trip from Columbus to visit Tom's Dad, followed by a 1-hour trip on to Richmond Heights, then hours of carpet-pulling - was done. It had been a separate-but-equally long day for Andy, who'd driven 5 hours from Rochester and would start digging into the house work tomorrow.
There'd be plenty more where this day's came from.