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.