Mint Ice Cream

Mmm...mint ice cream. I have a hankering.

I guess I can wait, though, considering it is only nine in the morning!

Anyways, you know the color of mint ice cream? The light green, borderline seafoam color? Well, that was the color of our dining room rug. Yes. Ew.

The 70s called and wanted their rug back.

Plus, it was so ugly and so faded that it was hard to even tell it was mint green! We thought that the rug was a tan color, but upon further investigation, we noticed that it was mint green. You could see little hints of the color shining through where furniture had sat for decades. (See the subtle green color along the left hand wall?)

Plus, the rug was screaming "rip me out!" Not only was the color horrible and the rug really filthy, it also had that old-people's-house texture. Do you know the one I'm talking about? The one that looks like this up close: 

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Apparently "old-people's-house" texture is also known as "sculptured nylon carpet." Yea, sounds horrible. Sounds old. Sounds like something that I don't want to keep in our house.

So, on Saturday we decided to rip the thing out. It was the last rug left from the previous owners. One of the first things we did, when we first took possession, was take up all of the flooring in each room. And just like every other room in the house, the dining room floor had a layer of carpet, then a layer of padding, then a layer of linoleum, and finally a layer of newspaper. Basically, these people tried to make the floors as cushy as possible.

So, once again, we started with this:

First, Jonathan removed all of the thresholds from each doorway. There are six doorways in this room. Yea, SIX. One from the kitchen, the bathroom, the guestroom, the closet, the living room, and the sun porch. That is a lot of thresholds. Once those were removed, we each chose the middle of a doorway and started pulling the carpet up along the sides of the room. Once that was all up, Jonathan whipped out his handy-dandy carpet knife and cut the carpet into wide strips. Then, we rolled 'er up and took 'er out.

After the carpet and the padding were both up, we were left with this.

Beautiful linoleum flooring.

This is where I left Jonathan to do his man-work. Actually, he only had one set of tools for us to use, so he did the next part. He ripped out the tack strips and pulled up the staples. He is fast. Me? Not so much.

After an hour-and-a-half of work, he was ready for me to help him again. So, up came the linoleum and the newspapers that were under it. Thankfully, we were able to break the linoleum into smaller pieces and take it all right outside.

So the floor was looking a lot better! No more mint green carpet!!

Jonathan then proceeded to go around the room removing the rest of the staples and nails. We wanted to call the floor 'done' this past Saturday, but unfortunately, that just wasn't going to happen.

See that black border? Let's get a little closer.

Yea, it's tar. For some reason there was also tar under all of that mess. We aren't really sure why. But, alas, it's there. So, now we have to address that situation. We are going to try a floor gel that is meant to clean up tar and various other greasy messes. Our local hardware store owner (and friend of ours) recommended it to us. I'm assuming it is something similar to this.

I'm praying that it works. If it doesn't, I'm not sure what we will do. I wish the tar wasn't there, but we will figure something out! I'm just glad to have pretty floors under all that mess! 

So, tell me, have you ever pulled up carpet to find beautiful wood floors underneath? Anyone know how to get tar off of a wood floor?