Why Yes, You CAN See 7 Types of Flooring From Here

Today I thought I'd share with you one of the charming kind of annoying aspects of our 1970s house.

There is one place in the house, the breakfast nook, where you can see no less than seven kinds of flooring. Yes, you read that right, from just one vantage point! Seven!

Overall our house has eleven different kinds of floors, not including the concrete in the garage. Which is probably pretty standard in older homes, before cohesive flooring and flow were important to people (I can just imagine the previous owners getting excited about putting in a different type of tile or laminate in each room. Yay, so different and unique!).

But these days, it's kind of crazy to have so many kinds of floors, especially when they can all be seen from one place!

Standing in the breakfast nook, turning to my left, you can see the cheap laminate wood floors (#1). But wait, look through that doorway at the other end of the room, you can see worn Berber going up the stairs to the bonus room (#2).

Then, I take a quarter turn to my right, to look down the entry hall, out to the foyer. Hall, nook and kitchen tile (#3), with a brick floor in the foyer (#4), and no real transition between them. And OH, don't forget that *new* brown shag carpet (#5) going up the stairs! (Yes, that shag carpet is only about 6 months old. In the listing photos, they still had grandma pink carpet upstairs. Why, oh why anyone would get shag carpet these days....although I must admit, it is comfortable under your feet. Just god help you if you drop anything on it, you may never find it again!).

Then, I turn again to my right, to look through the still-needs-lots-of-painting-and-work kitchen to the dining room, which has a light, actually in rather decent condition, carpeting (#6).

So that's 6 kinds of flooring, right there. This interesting feature of the house was all that we realized before purchasing it. But after getting the keys, and seeing everything with the previous owner's stuff moved out, we made flooring discovery #7.

I present to you the last remnants of the grandma pink carpet, in the kitchen pantry (and also in both entry hall closets). I shudder to think that A) there may at one time have been pink carpet in the kitchen and B) that they wouldn't have just taken it out when the tile went in.

And also C) that it is so dirty!

I briefly tried to pry it up with my fingers, but I suspect it might be glued down to the sub floor. So I've got to come up with a temporary fix to cover it up until we're ready to tackle installing hardwood floors throughout the entire downstairs of the house (which is probably about 2-3 years away from now).

Maybe I could just put a piece of wood on top of it and paint it? I'm planning on painting the entire inside of the pantry, including the shelves (along with the rest of the hall and kitchen trim), once I've recovered enough after all the other painting I've done lately. Or would pulling it up and then putting something over it be a better option, even if there might be gross and bumpy glue marks hiding under it?

What would you do for a short term fix to finding dirty, pink carpeting in your kitchen pantry? All I know is that I'm scared to put anything on top of it at the moment! And I don't even want to bother trying to clean it, it just grosses me out too much.