new carpet

.

Our family room has a door to the outside. Once upon a time, that was the way the dogs went out. The previous dogs. The first, long-ago dogs. This door hasn't opened in years. The storm door's latch would not, could not, leave the jamb so the storm door could open.

In order to replace the family room carpet, all the stuff from the family room needed to be in the rest of the house. I couldn't see having the old carpet, the new carpet, etc., etc., etc., traipsing through the rest of the house, too, so I determined we *would* open that #*$&#&^ storm door.

And so we did.

Naturally, in the 20+ years since we last opened this door, we changed the locks on the other two doors to outside, and forgot all about getting the deadbolt on this door changed. So Job One was to locate an old key. Luckily, we found one. (Sometimes saving stuff for possible collage later is a good idea!) Ok, inside door opened; time to attack the storm door.

With only a minimum of chowdering, we managed to coerce the latch into receding. Hooray! (I will note that the previous two times we attempted to open this door, many moons ago, it was to get the Christmas tree into the house. This is the first time we've felt it wasn't an issue to do it *quickly*.....)

Victorious!









Once we had the door open, it became possible to remove the latch entirely, so that this door will never, ever again, refuse to open.





The boys were already consternated by all the cleaning/moving/sorting/moving/cleaning required before there can be carpet replacement. These activities don't happen all that often around here, and they nearly always foretell a departure of humans -- very traumatic to the poor sad dogs.

With that heightened level of anxiety, they were not at all sure they were down with this strange new feature in the environment.

Like, actually go *out* that new way? I don't know about *that*!!!

Buzz required less convincing than Wilbur. Wilbur lived by his wits and his own judgment for long enough that he is not taking anyone's word about something being safe when he personally is not sure...............

Go out? Buzz decides that if Mom is out, he can go out.





In? That's awfully weird..........





Maybe if I hurry!





Wilbur, with much coaxing, eventually decided to try it, and no actual bodily harm resulted, so maybe it was ok............

Note, if you will, the very nice beige-with-darker-speckles wool carpeting at Wilbur's feet. As we never used this door, the carpet in front of it is pristine.... I wish all of it had stayed nice; we never would have launched into this whole replacement adventure.............





The next day, more weirdness, as the boys were trapped in the kitchen, mostly with Mom, while strangers were in the house, and there was much banging. For a long time, in dog hours.





Carpet gone; this is the old padding.







Yikes!





Bare floor -- late-1940s linoleum in the family room, and oak stairs.....







These guys were quick. New padding.





New carpeting.





The wool was lovely on bare skin (and almost certainly outgassed less noxious stuff than this new carpet), but it only looked nice for a few years, and then began to look tired. This time we went for industrial carpet..............

We knew that meant it would be darker than our old carpet (almost all industrial carpet is dark, go figure), and it is dark.... I really like the look of this carpet. It has speckles of lots of different colors. I am surprised that, over all, it reads gray..... I guess I'll have to get used to that. (I was expecting brown/tan....)

The new carpet, with the door-that-almost-never-opens.





The new carpet is good at hiding individual white hairs, but clumps of light-colored stuff are going to be a lot more visible than ere they were.......





This is seriously doctored. The camera's close-up not only is blurry, but wasn't anything like I see this carpet. I had to tone down the cyan and magenta a lot.... This is a reasonable attempt to show the colors of the speckles......





How does it look with a dog? Quite nice.





Wilbur is never going to be on the floor when he can choose a couch, and preferably a pillow on a couch. This ancient couch, tastefully covered with an old blanket, is directly to the right of Buzz's location in the pic above. We're thinking of getting radical and aquiring a new couch, too.....