January, 2009: New
Carpet
and No Funky Monkey Fur
The weekend before the carpet
guys came to rescue us from Stained Blue Carpet Hell, we
got some of the dirty work out of the way by removing the carpet and
the strange fuzzy fabric nicknamed "monkey
fur" off the stateroom walls. Carol volunteered to help
which made the project go a lot faster.
 The carpet came off
the hull pretty easily but that creepy "monkey fur" went down swinging.
It almost disintegrated as we pulled it off and it filled the entire interior with floating
particles. Whatever that stuff is made from, it looked even worse
off the walls than it did on. Handling it made our skin itch
so gloves and face masks became the fashion accessories of the
day.
 Morley
also disassembled the salon sofa so it would be ready for Jim to
take it away for re-upholstery. It came apart fairly easily once
we figured out where the screws were and we brought it home so
Morley could tighten up the screws and reinforce a couple of
joints before it got recovered. He
will also cut a hatch into the corner section of the sofa so we can use that
space for storage (the other two sections already had storage
hatches in them).
Updated later: as it turns out, we
didn't get a corner hatch after all due to the way the structure
underneath is laid out. Dang--dead space!
Finally, the day came when the long
awaited new carpet was installed. We hired two installers who
had been recommended by a dock friend and they were awesome.
They told us it would take a full day to remove the old stuff
and install the new stuff, and that's exactly what they did.
They started our project at 8:30 in the morning and worked
without stopping until 12:15 that night but they were finished
in one day which we did not believe possible.
They made short work of ripping out
the old carpet then spent the next several hours pulling out the
1,001 staples in the floor and scraping off the old adhesive. The
worst was the floor in the companionway. That little area took
almost as long as the entire salon--no staples but a lot of
glue to scrape off--but in the end they got the floor as clean as a
whistle.
Once the staples and old glue were
gone, they started installing the new flooring. These guys spent an
enormous amount of attention on the little details--every hatch
cover was meticulously covered and fitted into place, every corner
of every step was perfectly rounded. And for all this hard work they
charged $800. (We were so thrilled with the quality of their work
that we added an extra $100). These guys were the best and if
you are in the Atlanta area and want their contact info send me an
email at susan (at) susanmohr (dot) com and I'd be happy to hook you
up.
By the way, the carpet guys solved the mystery
of those weird stains in the blue carpet that had freaked me out
since the day we bought the boat. As it turns out, those
weren't stains at all--the carpet had been dyed blue,
and what I had thought
were
stains were actually places where the dye had faded. Thus the
harder I had scrubbed the worse the "stain" looked. Duh.
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