I cannot tell you how exciting it was to rip our carpet out for good. After all I posted about hating carpet over a year ago!
Dan’s smile in this picture says it all! In case you are wondering, yes our garbage can is inside our house in this picture. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do, right? 
Even the kids helped out. In fact, Creedy was a trooper. He was hilarious. He wanted to be right in the middle of the process.
I was surprised how easy it was to rip all the carpet out. All it took was a little tug on one corner and it came right up. {Granted, our carpet installation was not good, so that could’ve affected the process}.
Then, we ripped out our carpet pad. It rolled right up. Sidenote: it was FULL of dirt. I even have a dyson vacuum, and I could not believe that amount of dirt that was living underneath our carpet.
Once our carpet was out of the house, we had to remove the tack strips. It wasn’t a bad job once we figured out that a flat headed shovel was the best tool for the job.
It was so easy I had to show you:
After we removed the tack strips, we needed to remove the nails.
A simple hammer did the trick.
After the carpet strips were out and the nails were removed, then we scraped the floor with a floor scraper to remove the glue and residue.
Don’t worry it won’t be long before you will get to see the flooring. I promise! I just want to help those of you who have similar projects too!
xoxo,
Brooke
I am excited for you guys to remove your carpet! I did it a couple years ago and nothing felt better, so I know how you feel! We went with wide plank wood flooring instead and it looks beautiful.
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This was a TON of work. Wow.
Thanks for the tips! I’m looking to install a new carpet to replace my old carpet, so it helps to know how to effectively remove the old carpet from my house. It seems like ripping out carpet would be pretty difficult. It’s good to see that it was really easy for you to rip out your carpet. I didn’t know that I would have to remove the tack strips. It’s good to know that a flat headed shovel works best for removing tack strips.
We’ve been removing carpet from our house. The goal was to cut the carpet into manageable squares so they could be put in the trash cans (in our area they’ll take even that kind of trash). We were using linoleum knives and that just wore my hand out. The easiest tool for me to cut thru carpet was that little cheap saw that comes with a miter box.
I pulled up an edge of the carpet and just sawed a couple of strokes. I removed the bedroom carpet by myself in an hour, with the carpet in large squares to be disposed of.
You did a great job!! I don’t know if I am ready to do it alone, because of all the hard work and time that it requires. I admire your efforts, well done!
Thank you Cynthia!
Got rid of our carpets the moment we moved into our house. I just don’t like carpet in the living room and hall ways. Still kept it in the rooms although we had them replaced with new ones. Great feeling to rip out carpets and actually see the mess underneath. Feels great to get rid of the mess!
We just removed our carpet this weekend, too. However, our carpet was installed on wood subfloor, so there was a LOT of staples instead of glue. A friend heard that we were removing carpet and insisted that we borrow her carpet removal tool. We had already ripped up the carpet from the edges, which was easy like you said, but our carpet pad was stapled every six inches to the subfloor. The carpet removal tool was a lifesaver. It literally popped the staples out of the wood and all we had to do was sweep them up. The tool we used was similar to your floor scraper, but it was weighted and very heavy duty. My husband also used it to remove the tack strips and baseboards, too.