There is a program on PBS that I have enjoyed for many years called This Old House.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s all about experts coming in to assist homeowners with their projects involving the remodeling and repair of old houses.

This past weekend, in many ways it felt as though my wife and I produced our own episode, although, thankfully, the cameras were not there to record the experience.

Our carpet, for quite some time, has been getting in pretty bad shape. We’ve tried steam cleaning and other remedies, but I think the bottom line is just that the age of the carpet and the fact that we and our three small children have been living on it for the past seven years has finally resulted in an abundance of wear and tear.

We’re not sure of the exact age of the carpet, but we estimate it’s somewhere between 10 and 20 years old.

We decided it was time for a change, but as a result, we have to consider several choices.

We narrowed our choices to three: Replace the carpet, install new wood laminate flooring, or refinish the hardwood floors that lay underneath the existing carpet.

In order to make a decision, we decided it was necessary to take out the carpet and padding in order to get a good look at what was underneath, and for last weekend, this was our mission – remove the dirty old carpet!

It was quite a project. The first chore was getting everything off the carpet. We had this huge eight-foot-wide by six-foot-tall home entertainment cabinet in the living room, and getting that moved to the garage was a project in itself. After that, we moved furniture from room to room as we began the task of pulling up the carpet and pad, rolling it all up and loading it onto a trailer in our front yard.

The floors underneath were not in quite as good a shape as we had hoped for. There was one spot where some wood had rotted, and many places where the floor was discolored, probably due to spills of some kind. Over 60 years, there have bound to have been quite a few spills.

It was very, very, dirty. We spent a lot of time sweeping and cleaning. There was an unusual amount of sand all over the floors and we suspect much of it came from the playground of the day care center where our kids go.

It was a lot more work than I thought it would be removing the nail strips that are used to hold down the carpet at the edges of the floors. They had been nailed down with large, long nails and the oak had hardened over time making it very hard to pull up these strips and nails.

One of the challenges was trying to get the house back to a livable condition by Sunday evening.

We made it, but just barely.

We decided to have a wood floor refinishing contractor come out and look at the floor and offer an opinion as to whether or not the floors can be refinished to a high quality condition.

If the contractor thinks it can be done, we’ll probably give that a try as it is the least costly solution, and we feel that with three small kids, a sealed hardwood floor will be easier for us to maintain.

If not, then we’ll go back and revisit our other two options.

It was a lot of work, but it was a good weekend. I really enjoyed working alongside my wife and the feeling of satisfaction that came on Sunday evening knowing that at least one step in our "this old house" project had been done.