It was a long weekend here in British Columbia so I didn’t have to work today. I spent most of the long weekend in just my underwear with a respirator, ripping up the carpet in my living room. It was hot all weekend, with temperatures reaching up to 27 degrees Celsius in my apartment. I tried to work mainly in the evening when it was supposed to be cool but getting sweaty was unavoidable.
The good news is that I have essentially removed all the carpet from my living room. I removed all the underpad and put it all in garbage bags. For some of the high traffic areas, I just laid the carpet strips I cut back where they were originally, just because I didn’t want to walk on bare, rough concrete all the time. I can roll up these strips in less than a minute though. In the less travelled areas, I removed everything. For example, places where I have furniture, those pieces now just sit on the concrete.
There is also some bad news. As I suspected, my concrete floor is not very even. My dining room table now sits on concrete. The first thing I noticed when I put the table back was that it now rocks back and forth. There is a possibility that one leg is perhaps shorter than the rest but the odds of that are pretty low. I know the table is from Ikea but even Ikea furniture isn’t that bad. I also had a bookcase in the same spot while I was moving things around and the bookcase also rocked back and forth. There is some strong indication that is part of the concrete is fairly uneven. I can’t see like a local high spot or hill either, so it’s not like I can just grind down a small spot to make things better. This is the type of unevenness that is spread over several feet. It seems like this is the worst-case scenario.
Like I said in my previous post, the best way to solve this is to pour a thin layer of concrete across the entire living room to level it out completely. This afternoon, I played a mental game of Tetris to see if it was possible to move all my furniture out of my living room and into the other parts of my apartment. It wouldn’t be pretty and some areas wouldn’t be accessible anymore but I feel like between my kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and balcony, I could get everything out of there. The key would be using as much vertical space as possible. I’d also need to utilize the surface of my bed to store things as well.
In the next few days, I need to plan on how I’m gonna rip up the carpet in my bedroom. There’s less furniture in there but my bed is the biggest piece in my entire apartment and it’s heavy and difficult to move.