How To Remove Carpet

hi I'm Shannon from host improvements comm and today we've got some dirty old carpet here in this house and I'm just going to show you what I like to do in order to get rid of it regardless you always end up with some carpet at some point in your home that you've got to change out it's gotten stained dirty the dog peed on it kids spilled juice all over it whatever in this case it's just plain old dirty and wore out so what we're going to do it's quite a big room so instead of trying to roll this all up in one big piece lug it out the door breaking your back maybe knocking something over in the process and breaking it what I like to do is cut it into more manageable pieces but to start with what the first thing you want to do is get rid of any trim any registers anything that's going to be in the way furniture obviously so we'll go around we'll pull off the baseboards then I'm going to show you what what I like to do I like to cut this into strips so we're going to we're going to take our utility knife and just cut this carpet oh six seven feet wide whatever you feel like is is easier to manage we're going to roll that up get it out of the way we'll do that a couple times get us a decent spot here work and then we're going to get rid of the under pad as well and then the tack strips that are around the outside edge holding it down so so I'm just going to start oppai get rid of the baseboards here so I'm going to use my red flat bar and we just want to pry along something to consider now I just jumped right into this butt and it wasn't a concern in this case but sometimes your wall will be painted and they might have painted the baseboard right to the wall practically or you they whoever painted you know basically got the paint stuck on the top of the baseboard so in that case if your baseboard kind of looks like that just take a utility knife cut along the top of the baseboard between the drywall face and the back of the baseboard and that'll just prevent you from damaging the wall surface any and having to patch that up again in this case this one doesn't have that issue so we're just going to go along and pry it off if you're trying to save your baseboard you want to take it off and Mark on the back with a pencil marker ever just a bit of a location just so when you're putting it all back in it's easy to figure out if you're doing quite a bit of it you can mark it on here and then just put a corresponding mark on the wall as well so you know maybe this is a or number one or whatever just mark it there and then then you have a good idea where it where it goes back on a few days after you have taken it off so we got that one piece there that wasn't so bad I've got another piece hiding under this pink curtain here now I'm not actually saving these baseboards so I'm not taking a lot of care why they weren't nailed on that great so I've got the pieces you can see all kinds of nails sticking out of the back like that if you're going to reuse it then you probably want to pull those nails out with a pair of pliers or something I'm just going to bend them over we're tossing this out so I just want to bend them over so that they don't get stepped on in the mean time so we'll just get that bent out out of the way and I'm just going to move these out of our out of our room here so I'm not tripping on okay so we got those out of the way we've got an air duct hot air grill there we're going to get that out of the way I already undid these these little guides for the curtain so that isn't an issue so I think I can come right back over here to the edge of the room and like I said I like to cut the carpet in strips of you know six seven feet whatever you think is easy enough to lug around you know this is once it's rolled up even in a six foot wide roll it's going to be fairly heavy so you don't have to measure it out or whatever just basically pick a spot that you like pull this up just take your tilde night start cutting along there doesn't have to be perfect okay so just one little spot here okay so we got that all cut now you probably noticed when I started at this end right underneath here around the perimeter you've got this spiky looking strip here with all these nails poking up out of it that's called the tack strip I'm just going to pull a little bit more of this up just get it back out of the way those are some of the sharpest things you're ever going to lay your fingers on so one thing that's kind of nice and I could have even had them on before I started making that cut let's put some gloves on will help because it doesn't matter how carefully are half time you're going to you're going to catch your finger at some point on these things you definitely don't want an eel on them now these are going to be held down we've got a wood subfloor so in that case they're just held down with some some nails that are in there if it was a concrete floor they could be glued down with an adhesive so just depending on how they're put down he might need a little bar and a hammer whatever in this case I'll be Holt whoops I'll be able to just pry them up so you can kind of get it a little bit better look at that you can see all those those tails there that are sticking up in there they're like razor blade sharp I've never seen anything quite that pokey and half the time you can even kind of see it on here just from washing your carpet in that sort of thing or spilling drinks or whatever it'll go through the carpet and if it touches these it starts to get those nails a little bit rusty so not a bad idea that your tetanus shot shot is maybe up to up to snuff as well because you could be poking yourself with rusty nails so you just simply I don't usually do this just yet but I guess kind of into it now usually I wait until I have the under pad and everything out of the room then I just go around and pull all those up you can notice here that on a couple of them the nail that was holding it down actually didn't come out of the floor so just make sure you get get everything out of the way there okay so not difficult to get rid of if you were if you're just putting carpet back in again and those strips are in good shape they seem to be still held down well with the nails or the adhesive or whatever was on there you might be able to just reuse them so you know don't go too gung-ho and ripping them up until you you know for sure whether you want to reuse them or not in this case we're going to be putting wood floor down here eventually so we don't need them at all so so anyways back to the carpet now we've got it got it cut into a manageable piece I'm going to actually pull it out of that tack strip when the when the layers put the carpet in and stretch it that tack strip is what basically holds it back down in place when they're done stretching it in the room so I just want to get it free of that tack strip and then I'm going to start at one end and roll this up so you know depending on the size of your room you want to start with a fairly tight rolled start with because it's just going to get bigger as we go those are you her a little bit on the gangster s side you might have rolled up a body in one of these at one time I don't know then it'll really be heavy so there we go we got our first piece it's a lot more manageable in this case you know even even that piece there it's pretty decent decent carpet too which makes a difference but that piece there probably weighs 50 pounds easily so you can you can imagine if I rolled up this whole room then trying to with the length of it and the weight trying to drag it out of here so I'm going to do one more strip just to give us a little more more room here to work and then we'll show the getting rid of the under pad now you may have noticed when I was doing that I'm using my my utility knife and I've got a lot of blades sticking out whenever you do that it's not recommended for one thing but whenever you do you just have to be extremely careful these are snap off blades sometimes you'll be cutting along whatever you're doing and it'll actually break and you'll slip you don't want to be cutting towards yourself where if that happened you might you know cut your leg or arm or something so I've got this one all loosened off of that tack strip again same thing I'm just going to roll it up I'm being careful here not to kneel on the tack strip that's read underneath me just roll this all up there it's easily carried out to the truck or dumpster or whatever you're doing with it so now we're at the point where we've got the underlay most times you're going to find that there is an underlay under your carpet sometimes yet it might be a rubber back carpet so there usually wouldn't be the underlay doesn't weigh nearly as much as the carpeting so and I can see this underlay has been rolled out in strips the other direction from how we're cutting our carpet so what I'm going to do I'm just going to make a cut here at the edge approximately where we cut the carpet off and then one spot just cut this so it's again a little more manageable okay so it's just it's just foam there's nothing super hard about cutting it yeah although it's surprising you do need a pretty pretty decent knife or sharp blade I should say now the underlay when they install it is going to be stapled generally just around the perimeter and that's what these marks are that you're seeing it's just where it's squished down from the staples so all you need to do is just pull it up the staples are just going to rip right through it and just get it all loose here and just like we did the carpeting we'll get that rolled up quickly out of the way and like I said this stuff's a lot lighter so a little bigger roll doesn't really make a difference so now we're starting to see our subfloor and we can see here that now if I have this all done I could go around get all my tack strips off in my case because I'm not putting carpet back in here so I'd pull them all off it's nice to try to have a garbage can right handy when you're doing that that way they go right in there you don't have to handle them and and have another incident where you may be poor with yourself so get those out of the way as you're going around doing that you're going to usually it makes it easy to find the staples from the underlay because there's a little chunk of foam usually stuck under them like you see here so we need to get those staples out of the way as well and usually with this red bar that I use all the time it's thin enough I can just get underneath the edge of that staple and pull those guys out and if I had a little bucket or garbage can like I said I just drag that around the room with me so I could get rid of them right away so you could use a flathead screwdriver whatever works depending on the size of the staple or how well they're put in there sometimes you just can't even see the staple for the foam takes a second to find the edge of it and you may want a pair of pliers dragged around with you as well so when you get the odds stubborn one you can pull it out with the pliers even a hammer - sometimes you get one breaks off and you by the time you went and found a hammer and came back you can't find the little end that's still sticking up so if you have a great with you it's good to go so that's really the basics of pulling out carpet I guess the main safety issues are your back for one thing that's why I cut it into smaller pieces so I can roll it up and it doesn't weigh as much the tack strips are probably the most dangerous thing in the whole operation and you know you're dealing with a knife rate but if you shouldn't be handling knives you probably don't want to do this job so so I think that pretty much covers everything on removing old carpeting other variations you might see I mentioned foam back carpet there a few minutes ago a lot of times you'll see that in basements or maybe even on stairs or something with the foam back carpet most always that is stuck down especially if it's on concrete over time it's kind of stuck right on to the concrete itself so it's going to take some scraping and and work to get that cleaned right off the odd time with this style underlay like what we just removed you might even see it glued down you know around the perimeter or maybe the odd spot here and there usually that peels off pretty easily once you get get it started but same thing if it doesn't you may have to do a little bit of scraping of the sub Florida to get that excess foam off of there or underlay that's all I can really think of I think that pretty much covered it you should know how to take your carpet out of your room now so thanks for watching you can see all the other videos we have on our YouTube channel you can check out our website at house improvements calm as well and on the website we do have a forum page so you can go on there there are lots of different topics maybe you can help somebody else out or maybe you've got a question you want to post there and get some help from somebody yourself so check that all out if you have time and thanks for watching you

Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 172,073

Rating: 4.8091674 out of 5

Keywords: carpet, remove, removal, cut, tack, strip, under, pad, underpad, shag, pliers, knife, utility, living, room, bedroom, bed, hall, hallway, house, home, improvement, upgrade, replace, hardwood, contractor, flooring, floor, tack strip, construction, plush

Id: TbF8GcrDjvI

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2014