Untangling Life: Happy 13th Anniversary to us!

Traditionally, the 13th Anniversary gift is Lace.

As much as Matt would love to buy me something lacy I was really set on...

CARPET!!

Luckily, the alternative gift to lace is a textile. (proof right here)

Guess what? Carpet is a textile.

Woop Woop!

Getting carpet is a big, expensive, and stressful ordeal.

It's also good for organizing an entire house.

Our old carpet came with the house which was built in 2004. We moved in in 2005 after it was a model home for a year in the neighborhood.

The carpet and carpet pad were builder grade and they suffered through a lot of activity (and cat puke) in the 9 years we have lived here.

Not all the carpet was bad. We talked about only replacing the downstairs carpet, stairs, and upper hallway but I knew I would not like seeing the old carpet clashing with the new. So it was all or nothing.

(Matt had them save some of the good old carpet to use in his basement shop.)

The guest room carpet was flawless.

Preparing for the new carpet was the most stressful.

The installers would move the furniture but we needed to get everything off of the furniture and the floor. We took this time to go through every room of our house.

Take the guest room closet for example. It was jam packed full of stuff. I pulled everything out and laid it all over the room.

Piece by piece I organized, donated, threw away and put away.

My organizing madness.

(yes, all that came out of one closet)

I/we did this in every room of the house.

It was tough and painstaking but it was also refreshing to get rid of so many things we did not use or need.

We filled up box after box of garbage, not to mention trip after trip to Goodwill and the recycle station.

Somethings I just couldn't part with. Even silly things like all of my old cassette tapes (mostly singles.) We do not have a cassette tape player so I can't even listen to them but they are full of teenage memories for me.

We went room by room organizing and getting everything off of the floor. The entire upstairs which includes 5 bedrooms are all carpeted. We had to get creative with where to store everything since UN-carpeted area was rare.

The bathtubs were prime real estate.

Finally it was CARPET DAY!

In just two days the two carpet installers ripped out the old and installed the new.

I enjoyed chatting with them about carpet and their choice of music. (They brought their own boom box.) I even bought them pizza for lunch.

Room by room they did their measuring. Then they ripped up the old carpet to expose the cheap carpet pad. Next they removed the pad and scraped away to get all the glue and debri off the floor.