Poised On The Brink

Our house is about half ceramic tile flooring and half carpet. All the bedrooms are carpeted, and there's a trapezoid-shaped chunk of carpet in a room I imagine the architects rather snootily referred to as the "Great Room" when they were designing it. (Because the walls are white, I refer to it as "The Great White Space", consciously aping the name of the flawed-but-fun British horror novel, a book done in Lovecraft style but with bad pacing.)

Carpets and pets don't exactly mix. Maybe some people are able to train pets to never make messes on the carpet, but it seems that at any one time, at least one of our pets is incontinent for mental, emotional or physical reasons. "What's that noise?! It's THUNDER! I'm crapping right here!" So the carpets need fairly regular cleaning, which means digging out the carpet cleaning machine. It does a good enough job, I suppose, but it's a lot of work. It basically consumes the whole weekend, and you spend the weekend hunched over because the handle isn't quite long enough, and by Sunday night I feel like (and probably resemble) Quasimodo.

Then there's the piercing scream the machine makes, which is literally deafening. For a week afterwards the world sounds like it's been turned to the Jupiter channel - all I hear are leathery creaking sounds, hisses, and occasional pops. I spend a lot of time going "Huh?"

So is this really any easier that just taking up the carpet and laying tile where it once was? I have some experience with laying ceramic tile, and I know that it's neither easy nor exciting. It's a very wet and dirty procedure that's exceptionally hard on one's hands and knees, and if you aren't careful, you can create awful spacing and gap problems that will haunt you for the rest of your unnatural life. But when you do it reasonably well, you at least have the assurance that the tile will last a good long while and pet messes will not turn permanent. And the layout of our house lends itself to doing the floors piecemeal - doing the great room doesn't require that one do any other rooms at the same time.

But here I stand, poised on the edge of tearing out the carpet, unsure if I really should or not. Is my back up to the challenge? I think so. Is my sternum up to the challenge? I certainly hope so. Will I give myself tennis elbow again? Probably.

Tennis elbow. It's pretty funny until it happens to you. I gave it to myself when I was unloading a pickup truck load of carpet scraps at the landfill. I felt the tendon let go as I threw chunks out backhand, and for the next year my arm hurt. For a while it hurt so bad I couldn't even pick up a glass of water - my fingers literally couldn't squeeze hard enough to grip the glass, and trying to hammer tack strips off the floor? Agony. And once I shook a can of spray paint with my affected arm and nearly screamed.

So that's where I'm at. I stand on the edge of the tile and look at the carpet, and I think about tennis elbow. I should be thinking about measuring the room to get an idea of square footage, or comparing colors to see what tile would look good, but no. I think about tennis elbow.

But the carpet really does need to go. It may be worth the sacrifice.