Jo’s House Remodel Project: Flooring, Part 2 Carpet Removal

I received Quick-Step flooring and accessories for this project free of charge to facilitate my review.

Hey hey! I hope you have enjoyed this fun series we have been doing the past few weeks! If you have missed it, here’s a little recap of what has been happening: So far we have: introduced you to all of Jo’s house, {there you can see the carpet in all its glory} made-over the front room, added some peel and stick vinyl to the bathroom, put up the back splash AND picked out our amazing Quick•Step flooring! 

Phew, I am exhausted just from reading that all over again! HA! 

The original carpet was in place upon purchase and they knew it had to go. You can hire someone to remove it OR you can do it yourself! Carpet is fairly easy to remove so we chose to DIY it!

We recommend wearing gloves, a mask, and a good pair of shoes for this because believe me when I say, it can get nasty! Dust and dirt and other fun stuff gets stirred up when you start to rip it out. 

• Starting at the back corner and using a pair of pliers, you will just grab what you can of the carpet and pull.  Easy peasy. Then starting on the underside, roll each piece so that carrying them out will be breeze. 
• Next is the pad. That also came out fairly easy. Just pull up where you can and then roll that up as well.  
• Once the carpet and pad are all out, it’s time to sweep and scrape. We swept as much up as we could and then used the shop vac for the rest.
• The sub-floor was in pretty rough shape. There was even some mold in spots but it cleaned up really well with bleach and a scrub brush. We also decided it would be best to do a coat of kilz primer over the top just to be sure it was nice and “sealed”.  

• In the upstairs bedrooms, new carpet was going in so if that’s the case for you as well, you will want to leave all the tack strips that are not damaged. If you are NOT replacing the carpet with carpet, then you will want to take those all out. Using a flat ended shovel, we popped out all the ones that were not in a bedroom but left the ones that were.  Again super easy!
• After you have all the debris out of there, you’ll want to take a pair of pliers and remove all of the staples that are stuck in the floor. You want to make sure you get ALL of those out. Especially if there is hardwood or laminate going in. 

{Here is Jo working on getting all those staples and carpet off the sub floor!}

Look at all that dirt! Yikes!! The stairs were reeeeeally bad. I’m sure it was because they are a lot harder to vacuum! 😉

Vacuuming up all that stuff! 

Since we were planning on putting the laminate flooring on the stairs, we needed to remove all of those tack strips as well. A crow bar and hammer is seriously the best way to get those things off! 

Look at all the carpet pad. It was such a relief to have it all out of there!! 

 The new Quick•Step flooring is going in next and we cannot wait to show you how good it is looking! 

Check back soon!