My name is Kate Dear and I'm the CEO of Fêtewell. I renovate historic buildings and turn them into wedding sites. This bank was built in 1908 and it is gorgeous. It's an iconic building in downtown Frederick, Maryland and it sat there unloved for the last seven years. Totally empty. It was a bank its whole life and then the bank closed and it's just been sitting there. I decided to buy it and turn it into a celebration space.
We found the tile under the carpet during an asbestos inspection that you have to get as part of the environmental report when you first purchase a property. So we're going through with the inspector dude and my project manager and I are like, "What is this?" It was, it was the best day. We found all this gorgeous, gorgeous tile. It was in five or six different rooms and instead of covering it up, which would've been so much easier, we decided to really, you know, break our backs and restore it so that it could be part of the new venue. That carpet is very thick and therefore very heavy in mass quantity. So the first thing you wanna do is get the carpet off and let the tile breathe, like a fine bottle of wine. The carpet glue that
was holding that carpet to the tile was applied by somebody who wanted to win employee of the decade. The carpet glue was the thickest glue I've ever encountered in my short tenure as a tile expert.
You couldn't even see the tiles underneath there was so much glue. It turns out what works best is steam. The heat and the moisture from the steam are really some of the only things that would penetrate that glue. The texture of the glue and the smell of the glue will haunt me in my dreams forever. It starts off real dusty and then you get it nice
and wet with the steamer and then you scrape it up. And it turns into this nightmare fuel, kind of goo. It looks like Jabba the Hut ate a burrito and it's just the worst. Then what we're doing
is sanding the top layer where the glue has stained the tile. It kinda has this yellowy haze and the deeper you go the more kind of clean
and bright it looks. After adding the Zep floor stripper, what happens is the glue almost like becomes this like watery gooey-ness. It becomes one with the floor stripper and then you can kind
of take the rapier blade and just like, shwoop it along there.
That's the technical term for it. You shwoop it. And sometimes it'll be great and it'll do these little
like ice cream rolls. So with this room I went in there and I wanted to steam the whole thing instead of using floor stripper in there. So I started by getting really, really, really hot water in a bucket and mopping it very gracefully. I ended up just dumping the water out and just letting it kind of sit there to create its own soupy goodness.
When areas of the carpet
glue got real stubborn I put down this kind of abrasive powder. It was a marble polish and it would really
help me kind of buff out some of the really super stubborn glue. There are some areas of the tile that needed a little bit of extra love, specifically the "Tile Corner of Doom", I like to call it. The floor is so old. It's not super a hundred percent even. So we're using this attachment head for the steamer and it has this little like, wire bristle brush on it. And that's really a good tool for getting the steam sort of into those uneven surfaces where the glue is, has no mercy. Because we really wanna take really good care of these floors: they're marble, they're so porous they're so old, they're
beautiful, they're 114. And we're gonna be using
this space for events so there's gonna be red wine, there's gonna be people on heels.
We really wanna make sure that we're protecting it. So we have called in the pro's to finish the sealing process just to make sure we're protecting this beautiful piece of history. There's something about historic spaces that makes them the perfect place for people to start
their new lives together. The buildings have a history. You're creating a history
with your new spouse. It's really a wonderful
thing that I love doing, is giving these old sad spaces sort of this new life being part of the best
day of people's lives..
