How To Remove Carpet

Every remodeler needs to know How to Remove Carpet. It’s pretty easy if you use the right tools and cut it down into manageable sections. I have a bad back, so I’m all about painless carpet removal and taking steps to avoid injury.

We removed the carpet in Madison’s bedroom so I took some pictures in order to show you how to remove carped without breaking your back!

Carpet Removal Tools

First off, you’re going to want to prepare yourself with some essential safety gear and tools.

Dust mask in case your carpet is saturated with dust (like ours was)
gloves
safety glasses (mine are invisible in this picture — IT’S THE LATEST FAD!)
hearing protection.

a sharp utility knife

There are some other tools you’ll need to but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. First, let’s get that ugly, filthy, disgusting carpet OUT of the house.

OK, so you have your tools, now how to remove the carpet.

Use your utility knife to cut the carpet into strips that are manageable sizes. Small enough for you to roll up and carry out of the house and throw into the garbage pile.

Depending on how dirty and disgusting the carpet is, you might want to bag up the removed sections before you carry them outside.

After carpet removal, repeat with the carpet pad.

Once all that is out of the room, you’ll need a couple other tools to pull up the tack strip. Be careful. There are nails on both sides of those creepers and it HURTS if you kneel down in the wrong place.

Hammer
Prybar (I call it a CRobar but am not sure if that’s spelled CroWbar or CroBar or CroeBar or what…so I go with PryBar because that is easy to spell.)

Then you have to pull up the gazillion staples that secured the carpet pad to the subfloor. I like these tools for that job:

Plyers
scrapers (5 in 1 painters tool works great for popping up staples)

Last but not least, you’ll need a scraper to get ALL the crap that was splattered and globbed, blobbed and gooped all over the floor while it was being built. (They knew it was going to be carpeted so it REALLY didn’t matter WHAT was left on the subfloor.)

And carpet removal is that easy. Now you can prep your floor for something a little nicer. (AND I’m sure something that will be laid with a little more love and care.)