Hi friends! I hope this finds everyone having a WONDERFUL weekend! We have been busy this summer… I feel like all we’ve done is travel, do laundry, and go swimming… but that’s what summer is all about right?
As I wrote in my last blog post, when we took up the old sisal rug in our dining room, the floors were coated in the disintegrated rubber backing from the rug.
The first thing we did was take our ShopVac to it and verrrrry slowly vacuum up a lot of the dust/dirt/ disintegrated rubber/ sisal fibers/ whatever it was. That took up around 75% of the grossness, leaving us with patches like this one:
We then took some scrapers and had a family scraping party. It was oddly satisfying scraping it off the floor because it came off pretty neatly most of the time and left a nice ‘before and after’ sentiment each time a patch went away.
(I don’t necessarily recommend letting your 3 and 1 year old children help with the scraper but the good news is they didn’t do any damage to the floors… they just helped get the tippity top surface of the floor gunk off.)
After we went through and scraped to our hearts’ content, we ShopVac-ed again, then we had another family party (of which we forgot to take pictures): everyone got kitchen towels dampened with water and started scrubbing the floors. We had loud music playing and actually enjoyed it. When the floor gunk was wet it sometimes just came off onto the towel and sometimes was easy for me to scrape off with my fingernails.
After it was off, we just mopped the floor a few times and it all seems to be cleaned off now! I will share more pictures of it all clean as soon as I can remember!
In the meantime, my baby girl is turning FOUR YEARS OLD this week!!!!! Gahh! She requested a pig-themed birthday party so I will be sure to share pictures in a few days. :)
I’m impressed you were able to do so much with a shop vac and scraping! Glad it all came off and there wasn’t any lasting damage.
How did you contain the dust? I have a mountain of rug backing dust under my sisal where the backing has deteriorated. Concerned about shop vac exhaust (even with filters) causing dust to go airborne throughout house.
Hi Dee! It got SUPER dusty the room but didn’t seem to go airborne otherwise! We went extra slow and limited our movement so that we didn’t kick it up before it was all cleaned up. Hope that helps!
Love this We live in old historic home The Ruth Manly House 1908.
Hi Brea! Oh wow, what a treasure! Thanks for sharing!