Problem was, I didn’t have anything great to write about. We have been swamped the past few weeks, and it seemed to me that there wasn’t much point to anything I might share.

I considered writing a post about the absolute high I got using the power-washer to spruce up our deck last weekend.

If you, like me, have a day job in which you do not always get to see and/or know the fruits of your labor, I seriously recommend getting yourself a power-washer and pointing it at some dirty stuff. Look at what I was able to do with ours last weekend:

There was something so deeply, deeply satisfying about seeing such clear and undeniable results for my efforts.

See that strip of clean? That’s the power of the power-washer. Almost as amazing and awe-inspiring as the first time I used a Magic Eraser sponge.

Unfortunately, the deck still looks like this…

Yeah, bet ya wanna Pin this, don’t you?

…because we haven’t finished power-washing it and I haven’t planted the flowers I bought for the ceramic pots and we haven’t arranged the pots.

So, I can’t really write an awesome post about fixing up the deck.

I thought about giving you a family room update. Cane and I (mostly Cane) finished the quick rehab of the classroom cabinet we found a few weekends ago, and we’ve placed it in the family room where it’s going to go:

And we’ve decided we’re going 70′s style with our shelving, using brackets and plywood, which we’re pretty excited about because it’s something we haven’t seen much of and we’re putting our own twist on it and we think it might be really useful/helpful for others–but it’s not done yet, either, and it’s not terribly impressive right now.

Then there’s our gallery wall. Perhaps you remember earlier this spring, when we asked  you to help us decide upon an arrangement for it?

Yeah, well, in spite of the fact that we clearly do not need any more thrift store art, we seem to keep finding pieces we can’t say “no” to. Our latest:

Along with her there’s the church painting we found over spring break, and just last week Cane found a really unusual paint-by-number that he couldn’t let get away.

And now our wall looks pretty awful, because we’ve been throwing things up there on existing hooks just to have a place to store them and to see if we like the way they play with the other paintings:

Actually, about a month ago (when I brought home the new lady, who we have yet to name), we decided that we probably cannot tolerate the TV there any more, which means re-arranging the living room. We’ve got some ideas about that, but we just haven’t found the time to try them out. When we threw the lady up there we thought we’d be getting to that in a day or two, but it hasn’t happened.

I could write about our newest thrifty home purchase, which has been customized just for us–a Vari-Kennel for the dog who’s been ordered on bed rest because of a herniated disc in his neck.

Poor old Rocky is not a happy camper these days, in spite of his luxe digs.

On top of a ginormous vet bill, we had to buy a kennel because he’s currently not allowed to walk around. Luckily, we found a great one at Goodwill for about $25.00, a bit more than half off the price of a new one.

Ella is the one who did the customizing, creating decorations of Rocky’s favorite things on the roof of the kennel.

Alas, again–this does not seem blog post-worthy.

I briefly considered trying to get one of these things to some more finished state, so I could have some nice-looking photos to share. I even more briefly considered trying to come up with some small something of a project that wouldn’t be stupid.

Then I remembered what kind of blog it is we write, and what kind of readers we write for, and that’s when I realized the point of all these seemingly random things we’ve been doing:

This is how real people make progress on their homes.

We make it in fits and starts.

We make it in-between the other big stuff of life–important work deadlines, and kids going on trips, and sick dogs.

We make it in between all the small, daily stuff that never, ever goes away.

We make what we can, as we can. If the sun is out, we work on the outside.

If the rain is falling, we work on the inside.

We do what we can in little drips and drabs of time–because most days, that’s all we have.

Cane took 15 minutes one afternoon this week to add this spot of color to a bare patch in our parking strip garden.

So, no:  Today, we don’t have closure on anything. We don’t have a big reveal, we don’t have a great tutorial, we don’t have anything that’s going to go viral on Pinterest.

Some days we have that, but I’d like to think we’ve got something better to offer you today:  Encouragement and inspiration.

We offer a reminder that many home bloggers are running a business (even if they are focused on fixing up their own homes), and their goal is to provide a steady diet of Pinspiration. We’re grateful for the awesome ideas, information, and wisdom they share–we make use of  their great work all the time–but I’m reminding myself all the time that what they’re showing us isn’t real.

Those of us who have real lives outside the world of blogging and Pinterest and Twitter et al can’t keep up that pace. Not without giving up things that matter more than our projects.

When it comes to making home, we’re both tortoise and hare. Sometimes we’re sprinting, sometimes we’re plodding steadily along, and sometimes we’re lounging around on the side of the road, nibbling on a blade of grass.

Or a bowl of our amazing local berries. We’re planning a trip to the farmers’ market this morning to get more of these before their season ends. This is what real food looks like.

As long as cross the line eventually, we figure it’s all good.

But enough about us!

How are you? What are you going to do with your wild and precious Saturday? I feel like I haven’t talked with you in so long! Please let me know what’s been going on in your neck of the woods.

(Oh, and I’m a couple days late, but we’ll be linking up to the William Morris project. It’s pretty much the only link party I do any more. If you like real-time/real-life home bloggers, that’s the place to find them.)

Just so you know, we don’t buy every thrift store painting we see!

We’re pretty excited that today, we can finally tell all of you what that is all about.

Like the photo of Cane and me trying to look like the badass (er, often clueless) DIY homeowners we are?

Earlier this spring we were contacted by an editor from BermanBraun, a media company launching a new site for those of us in a demographic we still find it hard to believe we’re now part of. They wanted to know if we’d like to write for them.

We get spammy sorts of offers fairly frequently, and I almost deleted that message without even reading it because I thought it was more of the same. I’m really glad I didn’t.

Because this offer was a for-real opportunity. Like, almost-pee-your-pants for-real. (The resumes for the company partners include the words like “president” and “chairman” for such places as Paramount Pictures, ABC Entertainment, and Fox.)

Once we stopped laughing–because, c’mon, us, really?–we had to really think about it.

“Do you want to write for us?” might sound like a no-brainer question, but it really wasn’t. In our first post for them, we explored why we seriously thought about saying No, thanks. You can read it by clicking here (or on the photo above). (You can also read what Purple Clover is all about here.)

As those of you who read regularly know, the real DIY project we’re chronicling here is the one of making a good life. The house is just a vehicle and metaphor for that larger undertaking. And that larger project already has some pretty big, non-negotiables in it; namely, our kids and our careers. Although I like to refer to mine as a day job, it’s more than that.

Last fall I shared how I made a new commitment to my job of supporting teachers’ professional development.

This opportunity has made me deeply question why we’re doing what we’re doing here. As I wrote in the post on Purple Clover, we began blogging here to learn new things and find community. It’s never been about launching a different career or business. Although I initially flirted with the idea of going pro as a blogger, I decided last summer that I wasn’t willing to do more than casually date the whole world of social media. Going pro requires a full-on commitment, more like getting married.

Writing for Purple Clover feels kinda like agreeing to go steady. It’s saying: OK, yeah–I’m willing to take my relationship with writing/social media to the next level. But it’s not like we’re engaged or anything.

See, Cane and I really love blogging the way we’re able to do it here. We love the creative work of shaping and sharing stories, and we love the interaction we get to have with those of you who comment here and on our Facebook page. We love that we have the freedom to blog when we can, the way we want. We don’t want anything to change that. Signing a contract to write in another place and having a weekly deadline there will change what we do here. So we’re trying it out, but we’re not making any  long-term promises.

As we wrote in that post, we know this will come with some growing pains. It already has, even though the site is only launching today. You might have noticed that we’ve posted less frequently the past few weeks. That’s not just because of our new gig, but it’s definitely played a part in it. We’ve still got the same 24 hours in every day. Something’s had to give to make time to write there.

So why say yes?

Because it’s just too rich a chance to pass up. Not so much because we’re going to make a little money or gain attention, but because it’s a chance to grow, and that’s what we’re really all about here.

Most things I do are just that–things I do. But writing, that has always been part of who I am. I knew that if we said no, I’d always wonder if we should have said yes, because I’d always wonder how I might have grown as a person through this experience.

So, we hope you’ll read us there and keep on reading us here. We’ll be writing on a wider range of topics at Purple Clover, things that don’t always fit into the scope of this blog. In many ways both sites are about the same topic–how do we build a good life at this stage of our game?–but we won’t be focused only on issues connected to making home.

Please know that whatever we might be doing elsewhere online, this place right here is our online home. It’s our baby. It’s something we’ve made together, and it’s all ours. We have no plans to let go of it. We hope to have a regular post up later this week.

Just know that it’s the last week of school, we’re nursing a sick dog, and, honestly, hanging on until Friday will be viewed as a major accomplishment in our household.

Here’s how poor little Rocky looked last Tuesday night at the vet’s. He’s got a herniated neck disc and is on strict bedrest for at least two weeks with a neck brace. He’s not a happy camper. We aren’t, either.

Next week, we’re out for the summer–and then watch out. It’s gonna be all family room renovation, all the time. Unless it’s the kitchen table project. Oh, and we’ve decided we cannot live with the carpet in our bedrooms one more week. Those are coming out Saturday or Sunday. And we have to re-spruce our deck because it’s been summer here and it took a bit of a beating over the winter and we just need to.

OK, so it’s going to be business as usual, with us hopping from one project to another in our full-on ADD style.

Yes, it was just about a year ago that I came home to find Cane tearing this carpet up. No, those stairs still aren’t finished. (Don’t judge.)

See, nothing’s really going to change.

And we’ll still love (and answer) your comments!

I am now officially a design class dropout (having missed the last 3 deadlines), but I’d assigned myself all kinds of homework for this weekend–mostly writing that needed to get done.

I didn’t do it.

I blame it on the Rebuilding Center.

On Saturday morning they Tweeted that they had metal filing cabinets in stock (the kind with shelves and doors that flip up), and even though I’ve dropped the design class that was helping me design the family room, I’d gotten far enough in that project to know that metal filing cabinets might be just what we need to use as the base for the desk we’re going to build into the weird nook.

While there were quite a few filing cabinets, there weren’t any that would work in our space. None of the dimensions were right. We did see this completely cute little vintage stove, though:

Wouldn’t this be sweet in a little apartment in an old building?

I’d sorta had my heart set on filing cabinets as the base of the desk, and the few at the Rebuilding Center had me worried that the whole idea was a bust. So I talked Cane into driving over to City Liquidators. If there were a right-sized cabinet in existence, I knew we would find in there. In the warehouse across the street from the storefront you see below, they have nothing but office and retail equipment. They’ve got tons of filing cabinets and desks and chairs and display cases.

After walking all over three floors with our tape measure, measuring all kinds of things, we came to the conclusion we’re not going to find any standard-sized anything that will work as a desk in it. It’s too shallow for most desks and filing cabinets.

We did flirt with the idea of this desk, but let it go when we realized that it wasn’t going to provide good storage for our printer.

But the day wasn’t a total bust. Because we came home with this:

This is going to go along the wall in back of the couch, replacing the table that’s currently there.

and this:

We’re going to take the top off and use the legs and cubby structure to build a desk in the nook.

Aside from the groovy orange laminate top (which we love) and the funky school desk (which we love and think is very fitting for a couple of teachers), the best part was the price: $65 for both pieces.

Yes, they need some love/work, and no, they wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of perfect–but they’re perfect for what we want this room to be–which, of course, we couldn’t know until we saw them, which is what UnDesign is all about.

The design course (what little I did of it) was great because it helped me learn a method of defining what we want/need. I can’t tell you how useful that was when confronted with a warehouse full of options.

We took this to capture the chair, but perhaps it gives you an idea of the mostly random chaos in this warehouse.

When we found the storage cabinet, we realized that we could build a very minimal desk–because we wouldn’t need to build a lot of storage into the nook. When we saw the desk, we realized that we could build two work spaces into the nook, which reduces the need for the table that the storage unit would have to replace.

Considering the difficulty we were having with finding other things that might work, and the great price for the two pieces we found that could work, we decided to rescue these two cast-offs and let them lead the design. That, to us, is the essence of UnDesign: Being open to letting the design unfold in response to what we’re finding/learning.

We were so excited that we came right home and did some of this (instead of my homework):

And that was Saturday.

Sunday I had every intention of doing my homework, but then I discovered the Sherwin Williams Paint Color Visualizer (via Kelly at Eclectically Vintage), and I’m now so excited about moving forward on this project that I spent way too much time on Sunday morning playing around with some color ideas inspired by our orange laminate top. (Because that orange top, along with the charcoal Karlstad cover we recently bought to replace the brown one, are setting the palette for this room.)

As you can see from the two below, the visualizer is a little clunky, but it sure gives us a way to see what different kinds of colors might look like.

Here’s the original photo I used.

This is one (play-it-safe) option we talked about…

But we think this one is way more fun and interesting.

And then I had to take Grace to the mall to buy some things for a trip she’s taking next weekend, and then I had to take a migraine nap (which I’d like to blame on the mall just on principle, but I woke up with it Sunday morning), and then the sun was shining and the primroses were rioting in the backyard and needed to be tamed into submission. (Writing after a migraine nap just wasn’t going to happen much anyway.)

And that was the weekend.

Unfortunately, I’m not in high school and can’t just take a 0 on my homework and move on. It’s all still gotta get done. And even though school is almost out for summer (which means we’re almost off work), there’s still a lot that I’ve got to get done before the year ends. It means I’m working some extra days the next two weeks.

All of that means that we’ve got to take the rest of this week off from the blog. We hope you’ll check back next Monday, when we can finally share with you some news about a new place we’re going to be writing. (Yep, that would be one of the homework sources.)

So that was our weekend. How was yours? We’d love to hear all about it. Hope you’ll chat with us in the comments.

And if you’re in the mood for reading about some slightly different kinds of weekends, I’d like to point you to two blogs I really enjoy. Amanda, at The Habit of Being, runs a regular feature she calls Weekending at the beginning of every week.

Joining in with Amanda’s weekending is Simple Things Notebook. She’s always got such lovely photos every Monday (like this one):

My mom had a recipe box that looked just like this one.

I also make sure I drop by on Thursdays for her regular Make & Listen Along feature, when she shares what she’s been making and listening to.

Happy reading, and we’ll see you in a week.

So, we don’t really identify as Portlandians. In fact, we take a little pride in our efforts to embrace our ‘burb, something we once thought we’d never do, and we don’t really appreciate the smug stance that many Portlandians take when talking about it,even though we both used to do the exact same thing when we lived in other places. (If you want to know more about our conversion, you can check out this early post, a sorta love letter to our adopted hometown.)

However, hipster snobbery isn’t really the topic of this post. This is the topic of this post:

It’s the latest exhibit on our kitchen art line, and it’s one of our favorites so far. It comes to us courtesy of what we’re thinking of as our own personal Portland Moment.

Last weekend we were walking around the Buckman neighborhood in SE Portland,* when I realized we were by a vintage wares shop that I like.

“Oh, we’re right by White Rabbit! Let’s go look!”

Cane wasn’t as excited as me, probably because I never ever buy anything there. I just like to look at all their lovelies, but I almost never buy anything in any vintage shops because the prices are a little too rich for my blood. Still, you never know. Every once in a while you see a perfect something you might just have to have.

I was so disappointed when we turned the corner and I saw that White Rabbit was no more. It’s now Ex Libris Anonymous.

I’m not sure if the Ex Libris wares are famous outside of Portland (you can find them at this Etsy shop), but we recognized them immediately: Journals made from the covers of old books. We’ve seen them all over town.

We peeked in the windows (the shop was closed), and I snapped a few photos, and we were just about to head on our way, when one of us noticed the recycle bin at the front of the store.

And then we noticed all the cool pages of old books inside the bin.

We loved some for their old art and typography:

And some we loved because they made us laugh:

We sincerely hope no children were injured in the making of this book. Because we laughed our heads off at this one.

We plopped ourselves right down on the sidewalk and spent a good 15-20 minutes sorting through the treasure, setting aside the pages that we loved.

“What are we gonna do with these?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Cane said. “Something cool, though.”

I have to say: It pained me to see these gorgeous old book pages set out to be recycled. I was reminded again of why I never do any of the projects I’ve seen made from the pages of old books.

I’ve picked up books from thrift stores full of intentions to make some awesome something from them, but I can rarely bring myself to cut into them. It feels like cutting up a piece of history, and I just can’t do it.

My first thought was that I could do that with these pages. The books were already destroyed. But even though these pages are no longer in books, they are still intact pages. I might be able to cut/glue/transform the ones that just contain text, but we quickly realized that we can’t do it to the ones with art.

That is largely why we aren’t going to do any projects with these pages, great or otherwise. We’re just going to hang them up in our kitchen, where we can admire them in their nearly-original state.

I’m not judging the owners of Ex Libris Anonymous. I know nothing about where the books come from or how the bulk of the pages are disposed of. Maybe the books are already damaged in some way? Maybe these books were destined to be tossed out whole, and at least the covers and a few inside pages are now being preserved in a different way.

Still, it made me sad to see these pages tossed out like trash. I mourn the passing of our paper-based systems of storing and transmitting story and information, partly for aesthetic reasons, and partly because digital seems like a very fragile medium in which to entrust our collective knowledge. I worry about the prospect of going entirely paperless at some point in the future.

Not to sound like some conspiracy-theory Armegeddon-mongerer, but what happens if the grid collapses?

I know it’s not as simple as Paper Books = Good, and Digital = Bad; therefore, we must preserve paper. It’s a wall we seem to keep bonking our heads on lately, the one where every choice seems to have its negative costs and we’re not really sure which of the evils facing us are the lesser ones.

So, we did what we seem to keep doing when we hit those walls: We make the best choice we can, given what we know and can control.

We’re happy to have these pages on our wall. Some are flat-out beautiful. Others make us smile with their old-school charm. They flutter when a breeze comes through the window, like petals.

Corny as it may sound, they make something in my librarian-wannabe heart bloom.

And I’m writing about it here because I know that some of you are Portlandians. Or, like us, you’re suburban Portlandians. And I’m thinking that you might love and appreciate these book pages as much as we do–so much so that you’ll go on a little book page rescue mission of your own.

Maybe you’ll do something crafty with them. Maybe you’ll make great cards from them (like Portland writer-artist Kristy Athens does and sells in this Etsy shop). Maybe you’ll just hang them on your wall, like we are.

I don’t really care–I’d just like to see as many people as possible do something that extends the life of these pages a little longer. We found them near the corner of 29th and Belmont. We scored them on a Sunday afternoon. No one seemed to care that we were sitting on the sidewalk pawing through a recycle bin. (‘Cause, you know, it’s Portland.)

We’d love to know if you know anything about these books or if you get some for yourself or if you have any other great ideas for what people might do with these pages. Hope you’ll share with us in the comments.

I know this picture has nothing to do with the book pages. I just love these roses from our garden.

*Walking around Portland neighborhoods with our cameras is our idea of fun. We usually share the best of those expeditions on our Facebook page. Hope you’ll Like it if you haven’t yet. That’s where we share lots of stuff that doesn’t merit a full-blown post here. Think this is our favorite image from last weekend:

Also trying to get the hang of the Twitter thang. (Yes, I know exactly how unhip that sentence makes me. Don’t care.) Most of the lighter content makes its way there, too.

If it’s Thursday, it means we’re sharing over at Pancakes and French Fries with our William Morris compatriots.

Since February, I’ve been chipping away at getting all the glue off our downstairs family room floor a bit at a time, which we first shared with you in this post. (If you’re new here and what the full scoop on where we’re going with our family room, you might want to check out this post.)

This is what it looked like back in February, when we first began removing carpet.

Although we didn’t know exactly what we were going to do with the room as a whole, we did know some things we need to have in terms of flooring. First, the white carpet had to go.

It had to go because it was in horrible condition, but even more than that it had to go because we are not white carpet people. White carpet people don’t have pee-pee wiener dogs or spill-junk-on-the-floor-and-don’t-clean-it-up kids. We have both of those:

“Ella, what’s this nasty brown spot on the floor?”

“I don’t know… It’s been there since Friday night.”

Partners in messing-up-the-carpet crime.

That’s the kind of kids and dogs we have. We want a floor that kids (and canines) can spill stuff on and we won’t have to worry about them messing it up.

We decided that bulletproof flooring is easier than training our kids/dogs, so that’s why we arrived at a stained or painted concrete floor. Hey, all the cool coffee shops in Portland have stained concrete floors, so why not us?

We like the way they look and the nice part is that it would be very easy to put a different floor right on top of these later should we want to do something different.  It’s also a very economical way to go. Total cost should be less than a hundredish bucks in tools and materials.

Coffee shop work date. Rita took this shot while I was working on this post. See the cool concrete floor in the background?

We started by pulling up a corner of the carpet to see what was up underneath it. There was some good news and bad news. The good news was that the slab underneath was in good shape. No cracks or uneven surfaces. The bad news was that there were 2 layers of glue on the slab. The first layer was a black glue which probably was as old as the house. The second layer was yellow glue which was used to glue down the current white carpet.

And on top of the glue was the rug’s built-in carpet pad. We had to scrape all of that up, too.

I’m  trying to learn to be eco-friendly. We didn’t have eco-friendly in south Louisiana where I grew up. My mom kept a spray container of diesel in the shed for edging along the fence and sidewalk. We didn’t use no stinking weed eater; we’d just spray everything dead that we didn’t want growing.

My standard response to Rita when she catches me doing something not so eco-friendly is, “Hey, I grew up in the South!” Anyway, I’m trying to change my ways, so when confronted with the glue my first thought was to scrape it off by brute force. My first tool:

This one didn’t work so well. I managed to scrape off an area about one foot square. It took me about 45 minutes. I decided I needed more firepower. Trying to be earth-friendly, I went shopping for a better scraper tool. I ran over to Harbor Freight and found this guy.

This one worked way better. I was able to work at twice the speed as the smaller putty knife. I managed to get a 3 foot square area scraped pretty clean. It was damn hard work, though, and I could see that I wouldn’t be able to do much more than that at one time without a substantial break.

At this point we hadn’t removed any carpet. I just had a corner of it pulled back to experiment with how to get the glue up. I went looking in the garage for some chemical help. I had come to the realization that scraping by hand just wasn’t going to get the job done. With that in mind I figured if I used some chemical I already had at home then it wasn’t as big of an environmental disaster as buying new chemicals.

What I found and tried:

After trying the two above I decided I just needed to go out and buy something stronger. I was past the stage where I was thinking eco-friendly. I just wanted to get that damn glue up. I went with lacquer thinner. That stuff is strong.

Lacquer Thinner. I went out and bought this one. I figured I needed something stronger than what I’d tried before. Nope, didn’t work either.

I poured some lacquer thinner on the floor and let it sit for 15 minutes or so. If it worked at all, the effect was minimal. The fumes, though, were very strong. I had to open a window and put on a fan so I wouldn’t pass out. After a couple of attempts at it I decided that lacquer thinner was a no-go.

Next up:  Goof Off.

Goof Off. The ultimate remover! Well, that was their slogan but it didn’t pan out that way.

This stuff was supposed to remove anything but didn’t work very well at all. It wasn’t as toxic as the lacquer thinner but it really didn’t do much to remove the glue. Now pretty discouraged, I decided to throw eco-friendliness to the wind and go out and find the most toxic chemical I could find to remove this glue. I was in too far to let this glue beat me down. I drove down to the Depot and looked over their shelves of toxic substances and found this guy:

This stuff looked super-toxic. As I read the description and warnings about burning the skin off your body if you make contact with it, I knew I had found what I was looking for. I bought the big container. It was 24 bucks, but this was my last attempt to get the glue off before we had to make a new plan that included the glue staying right where it was.

While I was there I bought a super-heavy-duty floor scraper that weighed a million pounds. I figured at this point I was in it to win it, and I may as well go out in flames if it wasn’t going to work this time.

When I got home I put on a pair of thick rubber gloves (and shoes!) and went into the family room to do battle.

I poured out some of the toxin on the floor. It glugged out thick like jello.

I smeared it out with my gloved hand. I knew I was on the right track because I got a tiny bit on my arm and it burned like fire. It has to sit for a while to do its work, so while waiting I went upstairs and fired up my espresso machine and made a latte. That was just the right amount of time. When I came back downstairs, I was greeted with a beautiful sight. The glue had bubbled up under the stripper quite a bit.

I shoved the big heavy scraper across the area with my shoe and watched in amazement as the glue just came right up. Success!

There isn’t much to tell about the rest of the story. I followed the directions on the can and applied a thick layer of goo and covered it with plastic for 15 minutes or so before scraping it up.

It took me a few sessions of pulling carpet, applying goo, and scraping before I had it all up.

The “applying goo” step. Note the heavy rubber gloves and the shoes! But also, note lesson #2 below.

Some lessons I learned along the way that others may find helpful:

1. Being earth-friendly is cool, but sometimes you need toxins.
2. Toxic chemicals can burn a hole in jeans when you kneel on it.
3. Toxic chemicals burn like fire when they touch your skin.
4. The more a toxic chemical burns your skin the better it will work at removing stuff.
5. The small hand scraper actually worked better than the big heavy one for getting off stubborn glue.
6. Open the doors and windows and turn on a fan if you don’t want to pass out.
7. This is an activity best done on a day when there are no kids in the house.
8. Shoes AND socks are a good idea when working with this stuff.
9. It’s sometimes very difficult to be earth-friendly.
10. Maybe my mother was on to something with the diesel.

Can you blame her for taking any time-saving measure she could find? My brother and I were the first 2 of her 4 boys.

And what we’ve got now is this:

We’ve got a large, discolored spot, but we don’t really mind it. We’re going to try putting some stain on this, and if it doesn’t look great, we’ll go with paint. Feels good to finally have all the nasty carpet gone. We’re finally making some real progress with this room.

Editorial note from Rita:

Cane’s tongue is so firmly planted in his cheek in this post, it might take a while to dislodge it. When I suggested that he add more of the serious conversation we had about our choices with this project, he said, “Why don’t you do that part?”

So:  Seriously, we found that the question of flooring in this room presented the same kinds of challenges we ran into during our recent napkin debacle. Toxic chemicals are bad, right? So, why not just put in more of the eco-friendly cork floor that we used on the upper-level of the house? Well, the cork is eco-friendly, but the cork floor also has a super-duper poly coating on it. Doesn’t that mean toxic chemicals? We could replace the rug with more rug, but rugs (and their pads) are made with toxins, too.

It started to feel like we just couldn’t win with this one–so we went with the choice that’s more frugal and requires fewer materials that might later end up in a landfill.

And: If you are considering at all following any of Cane’s advice about how to do a job like this, please, please, please read our disclaimer first (please!). We joke about DIYing in our bare feet and testing the strength of solvent by noticing how much it burns your skin, but those are jokes. I mean, yes, we do sometimes work in our bare feet and, yes, Cane did burn some skin on this job. But we were definitely raised in the era of “do as I say, not as I do,” and we’re invoking that here.

And we’re invoking Sgt. Esterhaus. May his (not ours) be the voice you hear when embarking on a potentially risky DIY:

*Gas mask image courtesy of: Mikamatto via Compfight cc