I am a proud owner of a brand new home. I am in love with it. It’s cute the yard is perfect. It is old and lived in hard. And we couldn’t afford really nice. Pretty much everything we looked at had some serious issues so we chose the one we loved the most and the one we felt we could handle the issues. I have lots of questions so I will be here a lot.
I have a very basic knowledge of tools and carpentry but very little knowledge about how to apply that to a home ownership. So my first question is can you recommend books, websites, other lemmy communities that are also good resources?
And my second is how do you prioritize your home projects when under budget constraints and they are of equal importance or unimportance?
Last question (for now) how do you deal with the overwhelm/frustrations of previous owner issues or poor workmanship? (I still love it. It’s ours and I love it but we are picking up on stuff that we didn’t know about ex the neighbor told us there is a sinkhole under our driveway and it had already been repaired but poorly or the fact that we didn’t see it empty until after close and it’s obvious their pets handled the moving process poorly and have urinated in every room with carpet)
You can rent rug doctor steam cleaners, it wasn’t expensive. They have locations listed on their website. https://www.rugdoctor.com/rent/ We did every rug in our house before we moved in. It was amazing the amount of dirt that came out of clean looking rugs.
I may do this. We were also thinking of getting a professional in to do it for the first time since we don’t want our dog to think peeing inside is okay though she is house trained. But a rug doctor sounds far more affordable.
You honestly might want to replace the carpet. The carpet and pad and possibly the subfloor may be urine soaked. You can paint the subfloor with a smell blocker and then put in new pad and carpet. It’s a lot more expensive but then you know what you are getting. Also carpet doesn’t have a huge lifetime (depending on the material and quality) so if it’s 10+ years it might be at its age limit.
Steam cleaning urine is a bad idea. The heat will cause it to bind to the carpet even better and make it even harder to get rid of.