Progress is...um...progressing.

So, as I continue to rip carpet up, I am discovering that the hardwood floor beneath IS salvageable. HOORAY! Some areas will need some pretty serious work, but most of it looks decent.

I have never...NEVER...had to pull so many staples in my life.

To the person/people who put the carpet on my stairs:

SRSLY. You didn't need to put THAT many staples on each step. Unless you thought you were installing some sort of futuristic anti-gravity carpet padding, perhaps ten staples per step would have sufficed. NOT 60. And while we're on the topic of "Antics in Carpet Installation" -- was all the duct tape really necessary? Really? Because removing petrified duct tape from a hardwood floor is about as easy as getting a no-bullshit answer out of a politician.

Ok, now that I'm done with that...

The next few days will be filled with all kinds of home improvement festivities. The agenda includes:

1. The Home Depot Hustle -- wherein I fight through the throngs of do-it-yourselfers and future filers of personal injury lawsuits to get all the things I need to fix up my house.
2. The Power Sander Power Lift -- in which I wrestle a 100+ lb floor sander from the store, into my house, all over the floor, back out of the house, and back to the car.
3. The Pissed-Off Kitty Roundup -- what home improvement project is complete without having to pen up all the kitties and make sure they stay out of the way? Mine find this particularly distasteful, and make themselves scarce.
4. The Ratty Rolled-Up Carpet Toss -- Almost an entire house worth of carpet into the bed of a pickup and off to the dump.
5. The Wheel O' Injuries -- Let's face it...I'm going to be using a Skilsaw, a power sander larger than my person, hammers, screwdrivers, knives, nasty chemicals, and paintbrushes...it's not so much a question of IF I will need to go to the emergency room. It's more of a question of "when?", "how many times?", and "NOW what?"

Stay tuned...more updates to come, assuming I haven't amputated ALL of my fingers with aforementioned Skilsaw...