Yesterday I tackled removing the carpet in the first of 3 bedrooms to expose the hardwood beneath it. Normally this would be an easier project, but when you have hardwood that you are trying to preserve, it takes a bit more time and care. This was quite an experience, but well worth the effort.
This is not a rocket-science type of job, anyone can do it. But expect it to be TIME-intensive. It took me about 5 hours to complete a 10x12-foot room. And if you have furniture already in the room, expect to do some moving of furniture from side to side. My advice is do the easy things first, and then the hard ones.
For instance, in the room I did yesterday, I did everything except the tall heavy bookcase because I knew I would have to unload that bookcase before I could move it. You can do any part of the floor that is vacant, and once you have any section done, you can move furniture over to that finished section to open up more carpeted areas to work on. It's not pretty, but it works. If you have a lot of floor space, consider moving everything over to one side of the room, and then over to the other side, in order to have more space in which to work. I won't have that much space in any of the rooms that I'm doing, unfortunately.
Before you start, here are some things you are going to need, so best get them together before you get into the job:
First, a hammer, curved needle-nose pliers, box-cutter, and Stanley pry bar. I bought the 8-inch size Stanley, you might feel more comfortable with the next larger size. The IMPORTANT thing is that the end of the Stanley tool needs to be small enough to fit one side of the end of the tool UNDER a staple, as you will use this to pry up the staple. So bigger may not be better in this case. The 8-inch size just fit my staples. (I found mine at Wal-Mart for about $3.xx.)
You will also need a broom/dustpan, and waste can or bucket for your scrap. I also recommend wearing some glasses with shatter-resistant glass or safety glasses, as you will be pulling nails.
Wear SHOES of some kind. I wore house shoes that were pliable, which allowed me to move my feet and ankles more freely. But you will be working around staples and nails, so do wear some kind of shoes or else get ready to see your doctor for a tetanus vaccination.
And finally, expect to be shocked at the dirt, sand, and other miscellaneous crap that you find underneath your carpet. (And I bet you thought you were doing a good job of housekeeping, didn't you? Boy, are you in for a surprise!)
OH, and on the second day of work, grab a pillow for your butt, because it's going to be sore from the work you did on the first day!
If you've never done this project, here's how I did it:
Using a tool (or brute force), pry one piece of carpet away from the wall, preferably in a corner, and after you have enough carpet pulled back to get a firm grip on it, pull back the carpet to uncover whatever size space you will be working with. Use the box-cutter tool to cut the removed piece of carpet loose, and discard the now-defunct piece of carpet or roll it up and put it somewhere that it will be totally out of your way.
Once the carpet is cut away, you will see something like this.
The blue stuff that looks like sponge is the carpet pad, and at the top end next to the wall is the tack-strip that held your carpet to the floor. Be careful! The tack strip has little nails projecting upward and they are very sharp! Pull up the carpet padding (it's going to fall apart in places because it rots over time), and you will find that little pieces of the padding will adhere to the floor where the staples that hold the pad are located. That's really a good thing, it helps you locate the staples more easily.
But BEWARE! There probably will be some vagrant wayward staples in the floor that are not attached to anything, so you have to inspect the floor closely to find those extra staples! Those lazy carpet layers who installed my carpet evidently just hammered the wayward staples into the floor rather than remove them, so you may find some very "flattened" staples that are harder to remove than the rest of them.
These vagrant staples will be the hardest staples to remove because it will be harder to get them pried up off the floor. Click the picture below to get a really good close-up of the wayward staple and notice how easy it would be to miss it. (There is actually a 2nd wayward staple in the close-up picture, look just to the left of the wayward staple I identified and see if you can find it.)
FIRST THE STAPLES:
Wedge one branch of the end of your pry bar's long edge under a staple and pry the staple up gently but firmly. Sometimes you will get really lucky and a whole staple will pop out of the floor totally intact, however most of the time I dislodged one side of the staple and the other leg of the staple was still firmly in the floor. Now for more brute force: Use the needle-nose pliers to get under the staple, then grasp the embedded staple leg and pull upward firmly to remove it. This is why you need the CURVED needle-nose pliers, because when you get under the staple, it helps you to avoid scratching the hardwood's finish.
(Sometimes you will probably be unlucky and a staple leg will break off. These nasty, sharp pieces of staple leg may be so small that you can't see them but you can feel them sticking up. When that happens, get ready for maximum brute force: Grasp the remaining piece of staple leg as hard as you can with the needle-nose pliers and try to pull it out. Jiggle it a little, jerking on it might work also. If after several tries you cannot pull it out, forget brute force and just hammer the darned piece of staple leg completely down into the hardwood until you cannot feel it any more. It's going to be so small that it won't be noticeable.)
Toss all removed staples into the bucket as soon as you pull them out. (This is very important if you value your feet.) Once you have all of the staples in an area removed, you start on the carpet tack strips. This is not quite as much fun as removing staples was, trust me on this.
NOW FOR THE TACK STRIPS:
Wedge the long edge of the pry bar under the tack strip and push down on the pry bar to crank the tack strip upward away from the floor. You will think it won't come loose, but it will, just about the time you are thinking of giving up. This will be even harder if the nails that are securing the tack strip are long, and my luck was that they were about 1.25 inches long.
The strip's wood may split, but that's OK. Keep on working along that area of the tack strip until you have the strip totally removed. Once you have the strip up off the floor a little, you can sometimes use the other end of the pry bar to give more leverage as you work your way down the strip. Do whatever works.
The nails that held the carpet tack strip will still probably be in the floor after you have the tack strip removed. Use the pry bar to remove the nails from the floor. A hard popping maneuver with eyes closed worked best for me. You might want to put the wash cloth under the edge of the pry bar to keep it from marking the floor. My flooring was so hard that many times I did not use the cloth under the pry bar, but some of the nails were so resistant to pulling that I did use the cloth to pad the floor. It's a judgment call most of the time.
Sweep up the area and check visually and also feel with your hands (gently, you idiot) for staples or nails that you missed. They are easy to miss, so you will probably find a few that you overlooked.
Finally you have a finished section of floor. Start on the next section and so on and so on, and about 5-6 hours later you can have a big party to celebrate your success.
Note that in this pic of the finished area of hardwood, we can see a nail hole in the lower right area, but no staple holes. The staple holes are very small and not noticeable at all. If you find the nail hole offensive, you can be a real professional and use wood filler to fill it, but personally, since this is the EDGE of the floor we are dealing with, I don't plan to fill the holes, because they are going to be near the wall. Any imperfection at the edge of the floor can be covered by a small "quarter-round" piece of wood molding, which you can buy at any lumberteria/Lowes type of store.
The discoloration you see at the edge of this floor is where the quarter-round was previously located (I have made the picture very large so that you can see the detail, and the discolored edge is really quite narrow. Click the pic to see it in close-up.)
Finally, put all the furniture in the room back in place, admire your work, take two Naproxen and the following day you can expect to be sore in places you didn't know you had.
Here is a picture taken from the hallway looking into the room that I completed. Note that my new hardwood in the hallway matches the old bedroom hardwood pretty well, so I don't plan to refinish the bedroom hardwood. There are a few marks on the old bedroom hardwood, but I'm going to call that the "distressed look" and let it go for now.
I will have to get a threshold cover put in the doorway to cover the slight gap between the hardwood in the two rooms, but I'll wait until I get all three bedrooms done before I call my floor man to do the thresholds. (Click the pic below to see a real close-up of the finished job.)
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