Living Room, Part 2

We fianlly began again on August 21, 2004. Diane started by gradually peeling up the carpet edge by the Dining Room...

The TV / Stereo cabinet was the only thing we didn't move out of the room, so Diane cut the carpeting around the base of the cabinet and we removed everything from around it.
As you can see, the floor is already the same nice camel color that the Dining Room floor is. We are very happy with the nice condition of the concrete.

After pulling up the carpeting, we contemplated the carpet strips. We determined that the floor would have less damage if the nails that held the strips were not pulled out, but were cut off and ground flush. I busted up the wooden carpet strips (leaving the nails), then used a rotary cutoff air tool to cut the nails, about 200 in all. The nails were then ground flush with the floor...

On to the horrible popcorn-textured ceiling. As it turns out, the texture itself wasn't too hard to remove; it kind of came off in sheets. Where there was spackle/joint compound it was a little tougher, but all-in-all not too bad. But preparing the existing spackle was another matter entirely. The shot on the right is the ceiling after scraping all of the residual paint off, and then sanded.
It looks like a newly-sheetrocked ceiling, but it's just the existing ceiling cleaned up.

Even the top of the window frame needed help.

The big picture window on the west wall was no exception. This is also down to the brick.

It took some time, a bit of mortar, some sheetrock and more than a little spackle, but walls and window sills got repaired.

At the end of August, we kind of stopped again for awhile. We began to plan our big Road Trip, which we took during the month of October. Shortly after we returned, we finally gave away the television set and the entertainment units. Then it occured to us that we were expecting visitors at Chrismastime, so we better get the guest room ready... But it's full of living room furniture!

So we had to dedicate ourselves to getting this room done..!