How To Remove Carpet From Stairs

hi I'm Shannon from house improvements calm and in today's video I'm gonna show you how to remove the carpeting from these stairs as well as the under pad and the carpet on the side of the stair here as well so just for the convenience of the location of the video I'm gonna start part way down normally I would start either at the top or bottom and work my way down but this is just a better height to kind of show you what I'm doing you don't need really too much fancy 4 tools you're gonna need some type of a utility knife likely a pair of pliers for pulling out staples and maybe a little bar like this you can find a link in the description of the video for this bar we use it for a lot of things so if you want to get yourself one or 12 please use our amazon link maybe gloves I don't have them decided up I'm gonna use those yet so we're gonna start out here by removing the carpet off the actual stair treads and risers and if you just kind of feel back in this corner you can start either up there down here but I'm gonna start down here just feel if there's a joint because sometimes there might already be a cut there but if there isn't just take your knife and cut it so we have some place to kind of get a hold of the carpet and start with I'm just cutting right back in that corner like so and then usually it's hard to get a hold of it and pull it off but if you have a pair of pliers you can usually grab ahold of the carpet get it pulled back enough to get your hand in there well I didn't get a quick cut through here oh it's pretty tough stuff back there there we go so you can see as it pulls off they they basically just took a strip of carpet and wrapped it all the way around up the stairs any carpet that you might have on the sides is going to be separate from this piece so once you get a hold of this just watch for staples like you can see the staple here staples around the perimeter so you don't jam it in your hands this might be where you want the gloves but once you get it kind of started it's just a matter of forcefully pulling it loose whatever direction you need to to get it off so you can see these staples they were all stapled up underneath the and those are the tread there okay I don't bump the camera if I do sorry okay so it's coming off fairly relatively easy now I just bump the camera maybe what I'll do I'll just cut this off so we don't have to move you get the idea how well that's gonna come off once you get it started just cut this out of the way okay so in most cases you could start top or bottom and I think it's easier to start at the top myself just peel off as much as you want to whether it's the whole set of stairs or whatever and get it out of the way so what you'll be left with is generally there'll be an under pad stuck on there carpet pad and it shouldn't be glued but you never know generally I don't see it glued but it'll just be held on with some staples so you can rip it apart be handy to have a garbage oh dang it watch out for the sharpness of the tack strips so just pull off the under pad if you have a garbage bag handy it's probably the best because this ends up being a lot of pieces and you can see now we're still left with a whole bunch of staples where the under pad was stapled down so with the pliers you can fairly easily get a hold of those and pull them out they're generally not very long like these are maybe maybe a quarter inch to 3/8 long so they come out alright just that there's quite a few so clean those all off anywhere that you find them a lot that cleans off the tread now I don't know if you can see right here there's a few on the riser as well so you might as well get them all off while you're in them in the business of it so you won't forget any I think I got them all off that one so you'd simply do that on every single tread now if you're recarpet e chances are you could probably just leave the tack strips in place if you're going to laminate or wood or something like that then you're going to want to want to remove the tack strips so with a any kind of bar basically you can get underneath them no maybe you can't see that as easy there these guys are very pokey as you noticed a few minutes ago when I poked myself with them there are lots of little nails sticking up out of there and they are super super sharp so be cautious with that so you pull these all off nails they're left behind from now you can see the nails for the tack strips don't come out as easy as they do if they're just nailed into the plywood usually they're sticking out and up there you can get pliers a hold of them and just so I've got one more to pull off and then I'm going to show you what to do on the stair stringer sites okay so we got that all off now you got your stringers and same idea wherever you decide to do it probably need to cut if you don't start at the top or bottom just so you can get a place to start from and these are gonna be all a million staples holding that on cuz that's all they really can do down there so again I just use my pliers quite a bit to get a hold of it till I can get it started and just try to pull it off as best you can I just find the pliers work well because you can get a hold of it pretty easy Anna Griffin so I'll just get that out of the way you get the idea with that and again you're gonna have lots of staples these are going to be a little different type probably a little bit longer let's see what they used oh they're about the same there maybe 3/8 long narrow crown stapler in this case but we need to get those all out of the way if you're painting these stringers afterwards or something like that if that's what it's going to be finished as then a lot of these holes you're gonna want to do a little bit cleaning up and fill the holes and you'd be a little bit careful when pulling the staples out too so you aren't prying with the pliers or screwdriver or whatever and causing more damage that you're gonna have to fix before you paint them okay so you get the idea pull all the staples out and you're probably gonna want to have your shopback handy because when you're all done you're still gonna have a whole bunch of little bits of carpet and dust and whatever else is down there and it'll need a good vacuuming when you're completed so on so I think that gives you the the basics on knowing what you're gonna find when you go to strip your stairs and how to do it like I said you don't really need any real fancy tools you probably already own what what you need to do it which makes it pretty DIY friendly and doing something like this as a project before flooring installer comes is a good idea too because it's gonna save you some money and allow them just to come in and get going sort of things so it's a good money money saving thing if you want to pay someone to do the rest of the flooring then you can get the old stuff out of the way for them so hopefully you liked the video if you did I appreciate if you give us the thumbs up you can click Subscribe down below there too if you haven't already subscribed to our channel and as always in any of our videos you should really check the descriptions because we have links in there for all our Facebook page Ron sometimes two tools those sorts of things into our forum so there's some helpful tips or not tips but links down there to let you view all our social media basically so okay I appreciate you watching and please look for our videos next time

Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 135,789

Rating: 4.9471364 out of 5

Keywords: carpet, stairs, stair, tread, riser, underpad, underlay, staples, remove, removal, how to, diy, do it yourself, easy, save money, pull, stain, stains, old, steps, house, home, improvements, reno, fix, replace, up, demo

Id: NgAFd1uAyfw

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2020