Ok so I could understand, she did not want her 9 month old boy crawling on that awful carpet. I tore up the old carpet and carried it out of the house. The tenant kept asking when my sons would be coming to help me. I finally explained to her that is was just me on this job. Micah is a CPA and has a job that pays better than I get paid (yea, I know that is a bit of a blow to a father's ego) and Matthew is studying in seminary (if I am helping to fund that in a small way, he had better be studying).
We lay a lot of new flooring. Right now we are putting in laminate snap together floors only, no carpet. This is a picture of a bedroom when we bought a house.
Same bedroom with new flooring and paint. The tenant this week told me she wanted carpeting. I have learned you do not explain, you do not argue, you simply state facts. We do not put carpeting in rentals. If you want new flooring I will install it if you want to keep your carpeting, I am fine with that. "But I want carpeting" she said. My reply is simple, "we do not put carpeting in rental houses."
Sometimes when we buy a house the carpet is so horrid you have to wear gloves to touch it. The carpeting in this room was so bad it felt greasy. I really don't want to know what was embedded in it. I think there was a lot of tar in it from smoking. If you smoke, come tour some houses with us and see the residue you are leaving in your lungs.
Same room with laminate flooring and new paint. Those are cut open apples lying on the floor. Apples remove the smoke odor. The amazing information available on the internet.
This room had a lovely stick down tile floor, although the pink walls really made it say "a professional decorator was here" to me.
Sometimes just neutral and bland has a cleaner look. We are not fixing up houses to sell so we do not have to worry about buyer preferences. I just have to please me (that is as long as Sharon is too busy to check on my work). When we started this buisness Sharon chose the colors, but she is usually too busy to show up until the deed is done. I have found that if you take all the remnants of paint we find in houses we purchase, add all the paint we have left from other projects and you get a nice gray or tan color. If you run out before the room is finished, well you were going to paint an accent wall weren't you.
I do get some satisfaction taking a floor that really has no redeeming value other than it is solid
and spending the time and effort to turn it into something I can say (in my opinion anyway) looks a lot better.
(and for those of you who were wondering my opinion is the only one that matters until Sharon sweetly asks "your not going to leave that, that way, are you? Then of course my opinion doesn't matter anymore.)
I did get the new floor installed. This was the first floor we put in while a tenant was living in the house. We have still been installing floors as tenants were moving in, but when they are living there it makes it more difficult.
You have to work around their schedule and their furniture. When installing a snap together laminate floor, on some types you have to tap the floor together. (the manufacturers idea of tap is my idea of a good hit on the "tapping" block with a hammer. Now when I do that I am looking behind me to see that the pieces are joining correctly while hitting the block blind. I now know this is not a good idea.
Wow does that hurt. I found out you can split your finger nail in half and take a chunk off the side of your finger with just one whack of the hammer. We have 1200 square ft. of flooring to install next month. I think that Thanksgiving vacation will be a good time for the boys to get that little item finished. I am kinda gun shy about laying flooring at the moment.
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