Indoor Camping: Fixing Up the Fixer-Upper

Thursday, December 09, 2004

Carpet

“Exactly when are you getting carpet?” Cheyenneh, the teenaged General Contractor says. “How about now?”

We’re not ready. The longer we can put it off, the cleaner the carpet when we sell. We have rooms to paint, tile to lay, bathrooms to remodel. You don’t carpet a construction project.

The downstairs, where the General wants to live, is almost ready. That bathroom is tiled but fixture-free. The adjacent rooms in this part of the house are almost ready, too. It’d take only a few weeks of non-ADD activity to make it carpet-ready here.

We want to get the carpet taken care of all at once. This means finishing up the dreaded upstairs. It’s not the whole upstairs which scares us – it’s the bathroom. It’s so disgusting I haven’t used the shower since July. You can command the toilet to overflow and it will, gladly. You don’t even have to touch it. This bathroom will be tiled, but the toilet’s favorite overflow area, needs carpet badly. I don’t think an explanation is necessary.

We could carpet and do a lot of praying, but we’re already skirting the edges of irresponsibility by making our kids live in such a dump. The combination of that old bathroom and new carpet would turn me into Queen OCD. Every time someone went in there, I’d be standing outside the bathroom door with a plunger, asking too many questions of the activity ensuing inside. People need privacy. The carpet can wait.

Getting carpet, then, means getting the house done. The General continues to make comments about living in Camp Kosovo, even now. Even she can see the house needs many focused weekends before it gets a construction-free coating of carpet.

The one room we won’t finish before carpeting is the kitchen. The kitchen has a direct line to the dirty-shoe activity room: the garage. And the kitchen is so far free of fixtures threatening to overflow at will. We can finish the kitchen without fear of carpet ruin, although I’m sure normal people wouldn’t risk it. They’d wait.

They don’t have to live with Cheyenneh. The sooner she’s in the downstairs suite with its’ own entrance, the more normal the rest of us will be. I’m willing to risk her living in a separate entrance suite for a little peace and quiet. She’s only going to live there until we sell, so the wild party potential has a small window of opportunity. We intend to never leave the house during that small window. Parents who were wild when they were teenagers are the worst kind: we know exactly what not to do because we did it ourselves.

We hold out on ordering carpet until we can no longer make excuses the General will believe.

“I want Berber,” Charlie says. “It looked good in the last house.”

“I don’t.”

“Berber and blue paint: how can you go wrong?”

I’m too distracted to respond. I’m matching my paint swatches to hundreds, or maybe tens, of potential carpet choices. I bring my paint swatches everywhere, just in case. I’m happy with everything to do with my paint choices, even the names. How can you go wrong with colors named Cup of Cocoa, Pumpkin Butter, and Sweet Marzipan? It sounds like a menu at a catered Christmas party.

If I didn’t have such an active imagination, it might be hard to visualize these little pieces of color and carpet sharing a big house together. If I was cautious, I might end up getting the same thing every time I remodeled a house. I might end up with Berber carpet and blue paint. I pride myself on helping my husband take a remodeling risk every now and then.

“This might work,” I say, showing Charlie a retro-looking shag sample.

“Looks like someone peed on it,” he says. “Look. Here’s the Vegan coming home late at night, missing the bathroom and peeing on it.” Right in full view of shoppers, he imitates an 18 year-old boy relieving himself.

I found another rack of carpet much further away.

“I want light-colored stuff so it doesn’t look like a homeless house,” Charlie says loud enough so I can hear it. “We already have that. No pee!”

He finds the Berber section and won’t leave. Okay, I’m flexible, I think. I’ll keep my mind open. Berber is durable, even if it looks like bubble-wrap to me.

“Here’s a good one,” he says.

“I think that’s what we put in the last house. There’s no blue in this one.”

I know I’ll be swayed if I don’t think of something fast. He swayed my paint color choices and we both regretted it. You can paint over walls, which I have done three times now in some rooms. You can’t so easily correct bad carpet choices.

“Every time I listen to you,” I say, “it’s wrong.”

I assumed Charlie would reply. I’m sure I didn’t say it as nice as I could. My mind was still full of the image of him just pantomiming carpet peeing. I couldn’t find nice words.

“You’re right.”

Don’t you love hearing that phrase? I took it and ran with it. I got as far from the Berber display as I could. I found a textured carpet which looked good with my paint yet wasn’t so yellowy.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “It still looks like pee-pee, but the General does have that problem when she gets excited.”

I put the carpet sample down. No pee-pee.

“How are you doing here?” the carpet clerk asked. If she’d asked a few minutes ago, I would have gone with the pee-pee carpet. I want to get this over with before they all start looking the same. I’m easily confused. Carpet is so much harder than paint.

“I’ll come find you,” I tell her. “It might be minutes – it might be hours.”

I find another textured carpet I like even better. It’s not Berber and Charlie isn’t complaining. It isn’t yellow. I pick it up and look around for the carpet clerk.

While looking around, I happen to notice yet another carpet I like even better. It’s under a display I didn’t see before. It’s called textured Berber: something for both Charlie and me. I love a compromise. I notice it’s $2 cheaper and more durable than any of my other choices.

“What do you think?”

“I was thinking about what you said,” Charlie says, “so I’m not saying anything. I think we should get the same carpet that’s in the big-ass honkin’ truck. It’s nicer in there than in any part of our house.”

I pull out the sample and look at the name. Carpet isn’t named for food, for obvious reasons, but this particular name might work for me regardless. It’s called Crown Molding. Since we’ve skimped on adding this particular feature, we can get this carpet and yet still say we have crown molding.

Almost immediately, the carpet clerk appears right in front of me, smiling. “That’s a good one,” she says. “Cheap, too.”

“Perfect timing,” I say. “If you had come earlier or later, who knows what we’d end up with.”

I sat at the carpet clerk’s desk and answered the hundred and fifty or so questions she had before I could be excused and stop thinking about carpet. I was alone, as Charlie made some excuse to run off in the opposite direction as fast as he could. Both of us have a fear of sitting at desks, answering questions, and filling out paperwork.

“Oh!” the clerk says. “One thing I must warn you about. If you’re planning on pulling up your old carpet yourself, there’s a terrible thing you must know.”

I already told her we pulled up most of the carpet two years ago when we were straightening out walls. We’d have the skaters pull up the little bit that’s left. They’re getting low on deck and wheel money. I want to spread what’s left of my home equity around.

“I can’t emphasize this enough,” she says. “Please be very, very careful when you remove the carpet. There are these things called tack strips. You don’t want to get anywhere near those. Ow! The thought of them exposed hurts me.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve been living with those still in the living room. They aren’t the worst, if you ask me. It’s those little staples you can’t get out. They’re so random. You can’t see them.”

“What kind of place do you live in?”

I thought it best not to answer her. I didn’t want to admit what I’m doing to my kids. I’d have to think about what they’re doing to us.

A little help? [] 6:27:58 PM