Bye Bye Dog Pee, Hello New Carpet

The guest room in our new house started out like this.

It's a dark and blurry picture, but that pretty much describes the room. Dirty dark burgundy carpet and walls covered halfway with dirty paneled wood. Annie's room is much bigger, brighter, and is part of the new addition to the house, but had the same dirty carpet and a slightly mildewy smell to go along with it. The worst part of the carpet was in the hallway leading to the bedrooms from the living room. It was beige and had a HUGE dark stain. You can see it on the floor at the very left in this picture.

We had hoped we could clean the stain, but it was not meant to be. 3 different types of carpet cleaners later and the stain was lighter, but still visible. We thought we could live with looking at the stain, but things got worse. By cleaning the area, the carpet became damp and began to smell. Not just a mildewy smell, but a urine smell. Hidden odors in the carpet and foam underneath were released and we realized there was no way we were going to be able to ignore it. We had heard from our neighbor that the previous owner had 2 dobermans and we think the dogs used this as their main pee place (who knows why they couldn't use the 1 acre land surrounding the property). We knew steam cleaning the carpet wouldn't permanently fix the issue, so we decided 2 weeks ago to replace the carpet in the hall, Annie's room, and guest room. We would have liked to put in the bamboo hardwood in those rooms too, but with the new baby coming in a month we just wouldn't have had enough time. Of course now with the carpet purchase we hit the max of our renovation budget. No more big renovations or improvements for at least another year!

We did however save money by removing the carpet by ourselves...and by ourselves I mean my husband, his father, and little brother. At 36 weeks pregnant I can hardly bend over without experiencing a Braxton Hicks contraction. Thank goodness we pulled up the carpet ahead of time though. The huge pee stain went all the way through the carpet, foam, and into the plywood underneath. It smelled and looked horrible, and we knew if we didn't remove the wood it wouldn't be long before the new carpet began to smell and stain as well. There were 3 other small areas in the plywood in Annie's room that had this same issue, so the guys had to cut out the ruined sections of plywood and nail in new boards. A little more money and time spent on things we didn't know were going to be issues, but we expected these types of things to pop up before we bought the house. It sucks to deal with, but it's better to fix it now then spend more money, trouble, and frustration fixing it later.

Here's what the guest room looks like without carpet. Yet another kind of vinyl flooring in the house! Yay!

Of course to give ourselves even more work, we decided to go ahead and paint the wood paneling and walls in the room before the new carpet was installed. We were going to do this maybe 6 months to a year down the line, but we knew it would be a lot easier to do if we didn't have to worry about getting the carpet dirty. 

The guest room is one of the original rooms in the house. Our home started out as a small 2 bedroom beach house. You can tell how old it is by looking closely at the paneling. Portions of the it were covered in this crap.

What is that you ask? I have no idea. The crap took a lot of sanding to get off. My husband thinks it's the remainder of an old messy stain/varnish job. I just can't believe the previous owners never addressed the nastiness on these walls. In one hallway in the house where there's still floor to ceiling wood paneling, they painted right over the stuff. L A Z Y!!! Brendan and his brother sanded the stuff down and then Brendan filled the wide spaces between the wood panels with all-purpose white caulk. 

After cleaning/wiping down the walls and paneling, we started priming. The room looked so much lighter and brighter!

After 2 coats of primer on the paneling, we realized we would run out of time painting it all before the carpet was scheduled to be installed. So we only painted the bottom 6 inches of paneling with 2 coats of white paint before the carpet was installed yesterday morning.

Although we clearly have a lot more painting to do, the room looks so much better. I think we've brought it back to this decade and best of all, there's no more urine smell wafting into the room. Hooray!

Once painting is completed and furniture has been moved back into the room, I'll post pictures. And it you're wondering, we plan on painting the walls an oops color I got from Home Depot. It's a deep chalky blue. Maybe a bit dark for a small room like this, but much more interesting then the other paint colors we chose for our bedrooms!

Love the Beasts,

Emily