Jared, they told me as they earnestly shook my hand when they first arrived. Nice polite boys. They were there to replace my 1986 carpet, may it rest in peace.After they had removed all the doors and started tearing out the old carpet, they came to me with r-e-a-l-l-y sad faces and announced that they had some very bad news.
It seems that whoever laid the carpet in 1986 had left the original 1972 rubber-back, glued-down shag carpet on the floor as a carpet pad—and now there was a really bad mess underneath. They hung their heads like there had been a death in the family, so I understood how serious it was.
To get the rubber-back carpet off, Dan and Jared had to employ some jackhammer-type tools with resulting fine black rubbery powder flying through the air.
It could have been a disaster, but it wasn’t. It turned out that Dan and Jared loved a local oldies radio station. So all day, they had that oldies station playing at top volume in the house while they worked. Lots of songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Dan (or maybe Jared or maybe both?) loved to sing along with the radio. Just when you thought they couldn’t do any better than their rendition of “Fill me up, Buttercup, don’t break my heart!” they’d swing into a little Wilson Pickett doing “I’m Gonna Wait ‘Til the Midnight Hour.” The hits kept coming, and I felt like dancing.
Here’s my suggestion: if you have to have your house all torn up and carpet layers taking over your garage and your kitchen and what seems like every square inch of your life, make sure you hire Dan and Jared, the singing carpet layers from Floor to Ceiling. It makes the whole day seem kind of like a party. (Woo hoo!)
There’s something reassuring about having some regular working guys doing what’s got to be one of life’s ugliest jobs—scraping 36-year-old, rubber-back, glued-on orange shag carpet off your floors—while singing off-key oldies at the top of their voices. They just seemed like a couple of guys who love what they’re doing.
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