Why you should cut up your old carpet!

Just before the weekend we got the news we'd been waiting for - our bathroom renovation was complete! Our plumber has done an amazing job transforming the bathroom from "Peach with a hint of mould" to "Gorgeous clean tiles and amazing bath", and in less than three weeks!

More on that later (including the before and after photos). Once the plumber had shown us how to use the underfloor heating and handed over a pile of paperwork (and returned the key) we got down to the main work for the weekend - painting! We had to paint some sealing paint over fresh plaster, do some second coats on a few walls, and get some damp block around some windows where our vendors had simply painted over mould.

Once we got to a point in the decorating where we were dependent on stuff drying over night we were faced with a problem. It was still early afternoon and we wanted to get a bit more done. Our plumber had hired a skip for the bathroom clear out, and it was still sitting on our parking space. We've got it for a few more weeks, and I'd already thrown out some things left behind by the clearance team hired by the vendors. We've found the carpet that we want to get for the bedroom floor, so this seemed like an ideal opportunity to get rid of the old one.

At least we can now get new carpet put down!

Do you know how heavy a rolled up carpet is? We don't have a huge bedroom, the amount of floor space suggested that it would be quite easy to throw out. We managed to get it rolled up with a degree of huffing and puffing, because carpet just wanted to unroll, but we fought it in to submission.

The carpet had the last laugh. We're both used to heavy lifting from our jobs (or my previous job), but this was a new level! In the end we had to go for a combination of simultaneously lifting, pulling, pushing and shuffling just to get it out the door in to the corridor. Getting it down the stairs involved the Other Half carefully balancing on the steps while I tried to put the carpet down without knocking him flying. Finally we rolled it off the stairs on to the floor, thankfully we don't have bannisters, and then we realised - there was no way we would be able to lift it in to the skip.

In the end the Other Half got out his trusty stanley knife and hacked the carpet and underlay to pieces while I took the freshly cut pieces out to the skip, until we had finally reduced the carpet to a small roll that we could carry between us. 

I never realised how heavy even a small carpet can be! When it comes to doing the other rooms we now know that we need to do what everyone else does - cut it up in situ, and don't try to assassinate your partner on the stairs using rolled up carpet!