Some of the people that used to own my house had very different taste than I do. As I work on the house, I've found evidence of some of the walls being painted lime green, dark purple,  and orange. At one time, someone even painted some of the baseboards orange. 

While we are on the subject of baseboards, I understand that painting them and not getting that color on the walls or on the floor requires work and it can be highly frustrating. I also know that removing them to make them easier to paint runs the risk of them getting damaged no matter how careful you are. ( You also may find some desiccated spider eggs and lots of bullets! ) That said, some of the previous owners of this house were complete nutbags. 

The picture below is of a baseboard in my living room. Please note the swipe of paint that was left on THE HARDWOOD FLOOR. These dimwits didn't have the sense to even try and mask off the floor, or wipe up paint spills and smears as they went along! There are whole walls with a stripe of paint on the floor that has to be removed before I can redo the floors. Gah!!!

When we bought this house, the only areas that still had carpet were some of the closets.  To keep the free edge of the carpeting in place, they used a strip of duct tape to adhere it to the floor. Yes, I am serious, duct tape on the hardwood floor.  Anyway, the duct tape was old and coming off in spots, so the hardwood floors in front of those closets were a sticky mess. I ripped out all the remaining carpet, padding, tack strips, and cleaned up all the adhesive residue from the duct tape.

While the previous owners did remove the carpeting, foam padding, and tack strips from the bedroom floors, for some bizarre reason they chose to leave the squiggles of adhesive on the floor. When you do that, you end up with sticky squiggles of dirt on the floor which looks like this:

Yikes, I had forgotten how scary that floor used to look!   

Any way, after you scrape and clean everything off the floor, you sand, stain, apply polyurethane, paint the baseboards, and end up with this:

Till next time,

Cartmann99