Here we go all round the house discovering. Horseshoe over the door-- we are lucky? Large hole in the century-old boards before the hearth — we are not lucky?
Here she is in her introductory phase:
Carpets are very personal. I have a friend who sold vacuums door-to-door. Part of the sales pitch was to vacuum peoples' carpets for them with this super-vacuum and then show them all the effluence of their lives and bodies that had settled there. They had special white filters to pull out, coated in an inch of strange grey material, something not quite dust cause the fat content was so high. A butter of filth. Toe jam. They sold many vacuums. And recently I keep hearing ads on the radio for carpet cleaners — the basic message is you can't have people over for a BBQ if you don't get your carpets professionally cleaned first. That seems like a stretch, but let us never underestimate the intimacy, and thoosly the shame, of carpets. They hold the dust. They hold the smoke and the smell. They hold the stain. In exchange they are one thing only, comfortable underfoot.
Like most dirty things, pulling carpets is extremely satisfying. It goes fast. Everything looks and smells better. The acoustics of the room change radically. There's the rush-and-roulette feeling of uncovering old floor boards, which sometimes end before they reach the wall.
Before and not-quite after:
This is the little bedroom on the first floor, here with its carpet telling us all about how the before family walked around their bed and on the way to their closet. Carpets ≠ secret keepers.
And here are the wide, old boards telling us all about how the person who painted this room and ceiling white gave not two fucks about the wood floor. So much care flowing in opposite directions. We have, after all, not been very nice to the carpets, which we drew and quartered, stacked in what's essentially a dumpster-sized ikea bag, and paid to never see again.
"Someone went crazy or else a painter lived here who only used white paint."