More puppy prep - carpet removal!

We are in a rental home while Roger is in grad school and I have been fed up with having carpet for the duration.  With puppies on the way I decided to see if I could get the landlord to split the cost of installing an inexpensive floor in the living room in place of the carpet.  He said he thought there was a hardwood floor under the carpet and if so I had his permission to roll up the carpet and store it and I could throw out the padding and tack strips.  Cool!

I did this in stages, moving furniture from one side of the room to the other as I rolled up the carpet, pulled out the pad, staples and tack strip, did some clean up and put the furniture back on the bare floor.  You can see Red in the lower left of the photo - she laid on the carpet as it moved across the room until there was no longer room for her.

This is a nice oak floor, why would anyone spray paint a room and not cover up a hardwood floor first?

Not only was there paint overspray, spilled paint, footprints and handprints of paint, but there were regular deep gouges in a line across the floor.

Roger was less than optimistic about the visual aspect of the 'new' floor.  I was thrilled just to be down to wood, but he was a bit less excited about the condition of that wood. At the very least I knew I needed to deal with the gouges since they were raw-edged and splintery.  A trip to the hardware store and I came home with an orbital sander (ouch), several grades of stick-on sandpaper, a hand sanding block, some 'safer' paint stripper (for the Big spill spot) and wood filler.  Funny how projects take on a life of their own...

Here I am half-done with phase 1 - padding, staples (thank the inventor for vise-grips!), and tack strips removed, paint spill gone, a lot of the paint overspray sanded off.

By the time I had all the carpet in a roll (this included a section that filled in an area attached to the living room that is a small space between 4 other rooms) and had dragged it downstairs, had all the padding cut up into manageable sections and put in the garbage bin and most of the tack strips removed, it was 6pm and Roger was home from school.  I worked on tack strip/staple removal to make sure we wouldn't step on anything sharp in the night and left the rest until morning (and hopefully sunshine).  

Morning revealed that I still had quite a bit of work to do.  

We didn't want to completely strip and refinish the floor, but after sanding out the paint the floor needed something to protect it from absorbing spills, etc. so I got a can of wax and once I finished all the sanding (and vacuuming, and damp mopping....) I started applying wax (by hand, with a rag...). I had hoped to be able to use a buffing 'mop' that I could attach to the orbital sander, but this proved to be a failure, it wouldn't spin with any pressure applied and didn't do anything when used lightly.  So I spent a lot of time on my hands on knees with rags.

I put on too much wax, the can says it will cover 800 square feet (I think I used about 9/10's of the can).  I was approaching it the same way I approach putting Snoseal on my leather boots - glop it on and melt it with a hairdryer and it soaks in.  I even tried a hairdryer on the floor, when I realized I had on way too much to "let dry and polish", but it wasn't inclined to melt (what is this stuff made out of anyway?).  

Ah well.  I did what I could in two days (I still have to do the connector section between the 5 doorways) and made it nice enough to be enjoyable (and with the furniture in place the white paint around the walls is less noticeable).  It's going to be a bit tacky (the wax) in spots for awhile though....