1. Buying pink tile in large quantities. Make that any flashy color in large quantities. Please, stop and think! It may be fashionable now but in twenty years when the house is sold you'll be sticking someone else with a pink bathroom that won't be in vogue for another ten years.
2. Putting in white or beige carpet. Only a saint can keep white carpet clean. Probably not even a saint.
3. Putting carpet down over hardwood floors.
4. Putting carpet down over hardwood floors and slathering carpet glue over the whole floor.
As you can probably guess, this last one is our current problem. There's a wonderful hardwood floor buried somewhere underneath the hardened black sludge, and it will take a lot of money or elbow grease to get it up. Guess which one we have more of? :)
Also, I should not that the glue is hardly sticky anymore, so not only will getting it off the floor be a pain, it wasn't even holding the carpet in place.
Picture of the scene of the crime:
