Flooring 101-How to Remove Carpet
Updated: Dec 5, 2018
Remember when I said we pulled out the carpet downstairs? Well, that was the start to the great flooring adventure. Day 7-90 was spent doing this. In the world of ambitious goals, we severely underestimated how long it would take to do our floors or really what that even meant. In hindsight, this should have been done before a single piece of furniture was in the house and certainly not while working and doing all the other things we had to do.
Since we had taken down the half wall, we had to redo the floors right away. I think my husband to this day has mixed feelings on this decision, but we both agree now that the floors were the best thing we have done to the house so far. The first thing we needed to do was remove the carpeting in the house.
What we needed:
- Needle Nose Pliers
- Box Cutter
- Crow Bar
Removing carpet was simple enough. Since a few of the rooms had carpet, we thought this would be the easiest part to take up. The first thing you need to do is take off any baseboard. Take a crowbar and place a small piece of cardboard behind it so as not to dent the walls. Place this against the baseboard, and it should come right off. Some extra force might be needed. Then, to remove the carpet, take the box cutter and bring it across the edge of the carpet. It should cut easily and then from there you can pull it up. There should be a layer of carpet padding underneath, and this should come up easily too. The part that is a bit more effort are all the staples which have to be pulled up. We did this with a set of needle nose pliers and a lot of patience. Depending on how your carpet was installed and when, you might find two layers of staples that need to get pulled up. Make sure you have a bucket to put these in because otherwise it will make it harder for clean up. Make sure you pull up all the staples otherwise, it will make laminate floor installation that much harder. Sweep up the room and shop vac anything that you might have missed.
