We moved in at the end of October, and the absolutely imperative task #1 to accomplish was to rip out the atrocious carpets that covered the hardwood floors. We had already scoped out the floors when we first looked at the place because, honestly, if it hadn’t had those wood floors underneath we would have passed on it completely. We wanted to get this done before the container with all our stuff arrived and the house was empty. Luckily, one room was a late addition and has a carpet that was at least passable, so we put our sleeping bags and suitcases in that room and went to work.

The rest of the house was about 1000 ft^2 of carpet, consisting two bedrooms, the living room, and the kitchen. (Yes, apparently some people think carpet in the kitchen is a good idea…) While Kathy logged on remotely to serve on a proposal review panel, I started ripping up carpet.

Starting to tear up the nasty, old, used-to-be-orange carpet.

The carpet is gone. Most of the rooms then had a layer of foam under it.

And here is the uncovered hardwood floor underneath. Looks in pretty good shape.

Getting these carpets up was pretty easy, as they were just stuck with tack strips (boards with short nails in them pointing up) around the edges. Of course, once you start ripping it up, all the nasty stuff that’s stuck in it starts to come out, so you don’t really want to think about what’s in it. With one room done, I continued with the rest.

The next room had the same color carpet, but since there had been a dresser of some sort on one side, you could appreciate the original color of the carpet

In this room, too, the floor underneath appeared to be in good shape.

The hallway, uncovered. All floors had this very dark finish.

The living room with the carpet removed. Unfortunately I don’t have a pre-shot of the color if this carpet, but a sample is visible on the little strip in the lower left.

So far I had not seen any evidence of termite damage, which is the big fear in Hawaii. Termites can literally eat up houses until they fall down unless protective measures are taken. These days, most wood is treated but that was not the case in 1950 when this house was built. (Depending on how it was treated, the treatment also loses effectiveness over time.) The house was tented this summer, before it went on the market, so there shouldn’t be any live termites, but there should be existing damage. The house inspector called the termite damage “moderate given the age of the house” when he walked through the attic. In the living room, I started seeing evidence of termites.

In the living room, the first termite damage was becoming visible. The dark powder is termite poop, and the tack strip by the wall is totally demolished.

The floor boards themselves appeared to only have slight termite damage. Here’s one example.

The living room had the same dark finish, except that it was much darker around the edges. Presumably the result of some very large rug.

The floor under the carpet in the addition to the living room was unfinished.

The house was expanded in the 90s, when the lanai and the extra bedroom was added and the living room got some extra space to accommodate a door to the lanai. The living room addition floors were unfinished and much lighter in color. First, I thought it was a different type of wood, but in the seam between ald and new you could see the unfinished ends of the old floor boards, too, and they were the same light color.

This is a closeup of the floor boards in the living room (bottom) and the addition (top). The ends of the living room boards are also unfinished, so you can see that it’s actually the same kind of wood.

We were told that this is “clear vertical grain douglas fir” and very nice wood. The boards are almost completely free of knots (we’ve found only two and those are in the late addition, apparently standards declined with time) and have the grain standing up parallel to the board so you get this stripy appearance.

So far things were progressing at a good clip. The first problem popped up when we entered the kitchen, where we discovered that the carpet had been glued. We’d spend a lot more time getting the kitchen floor down to bare wood than we did on all the other rooms together.

The carpet in the kitchen was, unlike the others, glued down. Getting it up would not be as easy. Here a section has been ripped up, leaving the backing foam glued to the wood.