Hello and welcome to The English Like a Native Podcast. My name is Anna and it's time for a true story. True stories are episodes that, as you may have guessed, involve me telling a true story. Now today's story belongs to me, but as always, I'm open to telling anybody's true story. So, if you have an interesting story, whether it's funny, disgusting, frightening, sad or exciting then feel free to type your story out and send it over to me at hello@englishlikeanative.co.uk. Just make sure that you write in the title'True Story'. And if your story intrigues me, then I might just share it. So, today's story is called'Carpet'. It's not a very exciting title, is it? I might have to think about that. Carpet is a bit bland. It doesn't fill you with inspiration or excitement or intrigue, does it? Well, I have been up to my eyeballs in carpet this weekend. To be up to your eyeballs in something, or we would usually say up to your eyes in something, means you've got a lot of something to deal with. Well, I've been dealing with carpet, so that's all I can think about is carpet. Why? Because this weekend, my main task was to remove the carpet that runs up our stairs. We are doing a wider house DIY project, and that is to remove all the carpet from the stairs, the landing, and the first floor, basically, apart from the bathrooms. And the reason we're doing this is because we have a carpet moth infestation. Now an infestation is when you have a large number of unwanted insects or animals invading a place and it's usually causing some sort of damage or discomfort. A common infestation would be something like a rat infestation or some sort of like bugs or beetles, like woodworm or an ant infestation. My aunt and uncle used to have a real problem with ants in their house and they were a nightmare. Every summer you'd see the number of ants just building up and they'd somehow get in through the walls, come out of the cracks in the windowsill and then they'd march towards the sofa and get inside the sofa. It was just a nightmare. It was horrible. It really was horrible. But the things that are really a problem are things like rats because they spread disease and they gnaw through things, and they steal food. And of course, woodworms because they eat through wood and damage the wood. And we have actually had woodworms in our house as well. So, we have a carpet moth infestation in our house. So, these little moths, they like to eat things like wool, particularly, and they feed on all the fibres, not just of carpets, but they can get into your wardrobes and eat through your nice woollen clothes. They can eat through curtains and bedding and all sorts of things. Obviously, as they're eating it, they're damaging it and it's not very nice. Every night we would go upstairs and there'd be 20 or 30 moths all fluttering around. I remember one night going into my bedroom and turning on the lights and all these moths' kind of came up around the headboard of our bed and you're like,"Oh, I have to lie in that bed tonight knowing that potentially there's moths crawling around me." I'm not a big fan of moths anyway. I don't like things that flutter towards me. I don't hate them, but I don't want them in my bedroom. And I don't want them eating my carpets and my clothes. So, we decided as it was getting so bad, we had to do something drastic. And what we had to do was rip out the carpets. Now the are's lots of phrasal verbs you can use to talk about removing carpet from a room. So, you can take up the carpet. You can rip out the carpet. You can take out the carpet. You can also use more literal terms like lift up. But lift up doesn't suggest that you're actually taking it out of the room. You're just maybe having a look if you use the phrasal verb lift up. So, take up, rip out, or take out are probably the most useful phrasal verbs to use in this particular instance because we were taking out the carpet completely, ripping it out. In some places cutting it out and we've been taking it to the local recycling centre and getting rid of it for good. Now this carpet's been in the house since we moved in. I do not know how long it was there before we moved in. I would hazard a guess, there's a common phrase, to hazard a guess, which means I'm literally just throwing out a guess here. I have no evidence on which to base this guess, apart from the fact that when we moved in, the carpet was already looking very worn and quite disgusting. I have to say. So, I imagine it was already in the house for a long time, at least five years. I would say maybe even 10 to 15 years before we moved in. We've been in the house for 16 years. No, we haven't. Oh, my goodness. There's my brain, my crazy brain. We've been in the house for six years. And so, I would imagine the carpets been in there for at least 15 if not 20 years. And so, you can imagine a carpet like that as much as you want to, you know, deep clean, hoover, regularly hoover a carpet. If it's a deep carpet, if it's like a deep pile carpet, some of the dust and the dirt gets deeply ingrained, and it's very hard to get it out. My struggle was always at the edges, where the carpet meets the wall, or going up the stairs on every fold, every corner, every, every crease. I could not, as much as I wanted to, I could not get the dirt and the dust out. And this is a cream carpet, so it really showed up the dirt and the dust. And so, it was finally time to rip this thing out because I've been dying to do it since we moved in. I've got a low threshold for like dirt and dust. I don't like it. I've got a high level of disgust as a personality type. I am disgusted quite easily by things. And so, I've been quite disgusted by this carpet for a long time. And so, I found it quite cathartic. I found it quite therapeutic ripping this thing out. So, I started at the top of the stairs, and I started lifting the corner of the carpet and as I was pulling it up, revealing the carpet grippers. Carpet grippers are long, thin strips of wood that have loads of nails sticking out of them. And so, there's nails going down into the wood to hold these rods in place. And then there's lots of nails sticking up and they grip onto the carpet. So, once you put the carpet down, these nails kind of hold the carpet in place so the carpet doesn't move. So, there were, I don't know, maybe 25 carpet grippers up our set of stairs. And so, that's a lot of carpet grippers that had to be lifted. So, first of all, I pulled up the carpet and started ripping that back. Now the dust that this threw up was unbelievable. I would have to do it while turning my head away so that I didn't inhale all the dust, the dust cloud that was thrown up as I lifted the carpet. I tried to be as gentle as possible to avoid this, but still the dust was unbelievable. Now as I lifted the carpet, I'm revealing the carpet grippers. But I'm also revealing the underlay. So, I'm uncovering all the underlay. Now underlay is a foamy or soft-padded material that goes underneath a carpet or underneath a hard floor and it provides a level of protection and insulation underneath a carpet or hard floor. So, you would normally expect to find underlay underneath most internal flooring. So, I'm revealing the underlay and the underlay is looking a bit worse for wear. So, it's not just the top carpet that's really old and worn, but the underlay. The underlay was so old that as I started to lift the underlay, it was literally disintegrating. Now something disintegrates. It's like, it just becomes powder. It just all crumbles to pieces. It loses its structure. So, there was so much dust because this underlay was disintegrating because it was so old. And as I lifted the underlay, I discovered that these people who had laid this carpet had either just not worried about the stairs and the state of the stairs and just laid it on top of lots of mess, or they literally used about 20 staples to lay each piece of underlay. So, a staple is a piece of metal, a very thin strip that's bent. So, it's like a, if you cut a square in half, it looks like half a square and you use it to hold things in place. You'd normally put staples into a number of sheets of paper to hold the paper together, but you can also use staples in DIY to hold fabric in place. And so, they'd obviously used a staple gun to push these staples into the wood of each step. So, we have to remove the carpet, remove the underlay, and then I need to remove all the dangerous metal that is waiting to rip people's feet apart on the steps. So, I'd had to do this one by one. So, I took my chisel, which is basically a long, thin piece of metal, like a metal stick, so it's flat on one side but angled on the other. So, you get a nice angle on the end, and you can slide the edge underneath some wood and then hammer the chisel. I actually used a mallet rather than a hammer. A mallet is a thicker, hammer made of rubber, so if you hit your hands, you're not likely to hurt yourself as much as with a metal hammer. So, I would use the mallet to hammer the chisel to start to lift these carpet grippers. And that was quite hard work, I have to say because each carpet gripper had, I don't know, five or six nails in and then I had to use the corner of the chisel to start lifting the staples and then the pliers to grab each staple that was partly lifted and yank them out of the wood. So, this took me about three hours to completely clear the stairs of the carpet, the underlay and all the metal. We filled up three bin bags. I still have them sitting in my garage because I couldn't get a slot at the recycling centre over the weekend. So, I have to wait until next week when I can finally take and dispose of this household waste. And we haven't yet done anything further to the stairs. We have plans, but what we did manage to do was lay the hardwood floor upstairs. So, we've done most of the rooms upstairs. We lay some new, fresh, beautiful underlay. We've laid a hardwood floor. We have not seen any moths, which is fantastic. It means that we've removed the worst of the infestation. We actually had to nail a lot of the hardwood floor in place, so it's really solid. It looks beautiful. We've gone for a dark oak. My concern was that it would be quite cold. Having a hardwood floor instead of like a cosy, warm, carpet, but actually just changing that flooring from a dirty old carpet to a beautiful dark oak floor has really elevated the feel of the upstairs. It's starting to feel quite luxurious, like a really nice home somewhere you want to spend some time, you know, it's lovely. It doesn't feel like a rental. Some rentals feel so unloved, but this is starting to feel like a home that you can be proud of. And we've moved the furniture around. I've got muscles. I've got real muscles now from moving furniture. My partner has this huge double wardrobe with these huge sliding mirrored doors. Now, I don't know if you've ever lifted a mirror, but a large mirror is heavy because it's glass. Now imagine that seven or eight feet tall, and you know, I don't know how wide, probably the same wide, seven feet wide. It was so heavy. And there's two of these that we had to move, but we managed to do it. I thought I'd do myself an injury, but I didn't. And we've made our baby room, which is the smallest room in the house. You'd normally call this a box room, a box room. And a box room is a room that would normally be a cupboard because it's so small. In everyone's normal standards, the size of this room is, well, it's a storage room, obviously. But in London, and in like bigger cities where space is at a premium, where you have to pay a lot of money for any amount of space, box rooms are like a single room or used as a child's room because you can normally only fit a small bed or a cot in there. And so, we had it as our baby room, as our little nursery. Now we don't have babies. We thought, what can we do with this space that makes it useful? Well, we could just about fit in literally with half an inch space at the side of the wall. We could just about fit in this huge double wardrobe. And so, we've made it into a walk-in wardrobe, which was quite an exciting revelation. So, now we've gone from having what felt like quite a useless little room, to having a walk-in wardrobe, which again feels like a bit of a luxury. A room that is dedicated to just storing your clothes where you can walk in and dress yourself and emerge fully clad, fully clothed. And the room that was holding the wardrobe before again, quite a useless room because it's very long and narrow and we've always wondered what on earth can we do with this. It's such a long room. It's silly that it just holds a wardrobe, but it's quite narrow so I don't think it would work to be a bedroom. Anyway, we've moved the wardrobe, we've laid the floor, and now we've put a bed in there, and it actually looks like it could work as a bedroom. We just need to be very clever with adding some storage, maybe drilling some shelves and things up onto the walls, doing some purpose-built furniture, and I think it's gonna work out well. So, the moral of this story, the reason I'm sharing this story with you is because what started out as a problem, a carpet moth infestation, what a nightmare, what started out as something that was a huge issue and problem has turned into an exciting revelation of the potential that our house actually has. So, sometimes the things that bother us the most can have these huge silver linings, can reveal something you never thought was possible. I thought putting in hardwood floors would just be making the house feel cold and horrible and unhomely when actually we've ended up making two rooms that felt quite useless feel really great and useful. And the wooden floor has lifted the whole feel of the first floor. So, I am really pleased that those moths decided to eat through my carpet."Thank you, moths." Just to go through a couple of those phrases that I used, we talked about taking up or ripping out the carpets. I talked about the underlay, which is that soft layer that goes underneath the carpet. It provides cushioning and insulation. I talked about stapling the underlay into place. I talked about hardwood flooring, which is sometimes called laminate flooring. It depends on the type of material, but it all has the same look and feel. It's a hard wood effect floor. I talked about carpet moths, little fluttery moths that like to eat fibres. I talked about having an infestation, which is a number of unwanted insects or animals invading a place. I talked about uncovering the horrors that were under the stairs. So, to uncover is to reveal something. I talked about making our baby room into a walk-in wardrobe. So, a wardrobe that is large enough that you can literally walk into it as well as store your clothes inside it. Okay. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like the transcripts to this and other episodes, and you'd be interested in getting your hands on the vocabulary list, then just take a look at the show notes and I'll explain exactly how you can do that. So, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed it, please give it a thumbs up or a rating or review. That would be very much appreciated. And until next time, take very good care and goodbye.