How Your Carpet Removal Goes So Smoothly
When you decide to buy a fresh new carpet, you’ll have to get rid of the old stuff. Carpet removal can be quite an upheaval in your home, but our installers are pros! They’ll take out and get rid of the old stuff at the same time they put in your beautiful new carpet.
If you’re the type who likes to know how professionals work, read on! There are a few things our installers do that make it easier, and this way you’ll know just what to expect.
Be Prepared
A real professional will make sure they have everything they need on hand — this is a big project and they don’t want to be making extra trips to the truck in the middle of it. They’ll remove any doors that swing into the room, including bifold closet doors. Next, they clear the room of everything, including all the furniture. Gloves are key! All our installers wear gloves to protect themselves from the tack strip under the edges of the carpet.
Removing The Carpet Itself
Carpet removal starts with cutting a slit in the carpet about six inches from the corner of the room. The next step is to pull the carpet off the tack strip, but carefully — those tacks are sharp, so hand and knee protection is important.
As our installers pull the carpet off the floor, they’ll fold it toward the middle of the room and cut along the fold. Then, they’ll roll up the pieces they cut off and tape the rolls up with duct tape. This minimizes small pieces of debris and lets them get the old carpet out of the house without scuffing anything or knocking anything over.
Taking The Padding Off
Carpet padding is in smaller sections already — that’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s attached to the floor, section by section. If you’re lucky, that padding is held down by staples. It’s pretty easy for our installers to pull up the padding — wearing gloves to protect themselves from the staples — and throw it away.
There will be lots of staples left in the floor, so they’ll use a floor scraper to dig the staples out of the floor in big swaths. If the padding is glued on — as is often the case with carpet laid on concrete — the floor scraper will be even more important to scrape the padding off the subfloor and gather it up to be thrown out.
What About The Tack Strip?
In most cases, the tack strip should stay, but there are exceptions. If the tack strip is rusted by age or a spill that came through the old carpet, the rust can bleed through the new carpet and cause stains. If the tack strip is too close to the baseboard, it should be removed as well.
And that’s it! Having your carpet removed seems intimidating, especially if you’re not following what’s going on, but if you know what to expect ahead of time, it should go smoothly.
