Has anyone ever tried pulling up carpet before? I know Jesse has, I remember how long it took him, so I wasn’t looking forward to the challenge. But if you’ve seen any “before” pictures you know how gross this carpet was. Although I promise you, the pictures don’t do it justice. I think my father put it best… Imagine having a coffee every morning for a year and instead of drinking it you threw it on the floor, and then didn’t vacuum or clean anything, ever! I’m paraphrasing but you get the gist.

Anyway, we knew that one of our first tasks had to be pulling up and getting rid of the carpet. The inspector even said to us ‘You’re not thinking about trying to clean that carpet, right?’ Ah, let me think about that… no! So our first day in the house, I get into my very lovely vintage overalls, (seriously, once you’re over 25 you shouldn’t wear the things unless you are pregnant of working, I digress) a dust mask (yeah like that protected me from the filth) and a variety of poking, cutting and pulling tools.

So the process of pulling up the carpet wasn’t that bad. Really I just stuck my hands at the end of the carpet where it lifted and just pulled as hard as I could, the stuff came right up. The stapels in my hand weren’t great but I managed to avoid them. I do wonder however if all carpet tears that easily or is it just because this stuff was old and gross.

I pulled up the hallway carpet in once piece as it wasn’t that big. The underpadding was ok in most places. The area in the middle was a little worn down, I guess it was a higher traffic area. That stuff was kind of ground into the floor and I had to scrub at it with a brush.

As I was working I noticed a pile of sparkles around the edges of the linen closet. I noticed this in the master bedroom too. Sparkles and beads, it’s like the kids (or maybe the adults) were doing crafts in the hall and the bedrooms and kept spilling everything and not really cleaning it up. It was very strange.

Pulling up the bedroom carpet was a little different, obviously since there was so much more of it. So I took it up in strips. This made it easier to handle and to put in the trash. Although it was pretty hard on my back and got pretty annoying after the third strip. The underpadding in the bedroom was in pretty good shape and came up quite easily. We were so surprised at how good the floor looked in the bedroom. Although that isn’t the case anymore, as I’m sure Ted will talk about when he gets to talking about the bathroom, which should be any day now! Seriously, look how shiny…

Although I’m not writing about it in this order, I did pull up the carpet in an area, then the underpadding and then the tacks and staples. It made it less monotonous for me. But removing the tacks and staples was not a fun job. Sitting on the dirty floor, pulling up sharp and rusty things that scratched me and then broke in two and didn’t want to come out… ugg. Ted was pulling tiles out of the bathroom floor at that time and between the two of us I can’t count how many times we weren’t back and forth to my little make-shift first aid station. I was being pretty anal about taking care of even the tiniest cut from anything in this place - alcohol, Polysporin and BandAids were our friends for a few days.

Basically I found a system that worked. For staples I used a flat head screwdriver and just pryed them up. I had to try to not scratch the floor but as this wasn’t a huge issue in this case it was pretty easy. For the real carpet tacks it was a trial and error process depending on how deep and rusty it was. If they were in good shape I actually used the screwdriver to pull them up a little and then very small wire cutters or needlenose pliers to gentle wiggle them out of the floor. This also worked for the rusty staples. Sometimes the tacks and the staples were in such bad shape that they broke when you touched them. As I don’t want pieces of sharp metal sticking out of my floor I was very carefull to pinch the edges with the wire cutters and take the time to wiggle the piece out. There were only two, I think, that I couldn’t get at at all. Those I hammered into the floor. There was one particular corner of the bedroom that sadly was the last corner I made it to, just because of the pattern I was following. Seriously it had more tacks, staples and nails (yes, I said NAILS) then the rest of the floor together. Wow, it took me forever and I still couldn’t get them out. I was there for a long time… Eventually I got to that point that I was going to kill something so I left it. After we moved in I made Ted get at it. I think he pulled out like 36 seperate pieces in that corner. It’s like they were afriad that the carpet was trying to leave or something.

What was quite interesting is when we came back to the house on the second day, we walked in and it STANK. It was gross. We couldn’t understand what was going on until we discovered that it was the carpet. Pulling it up and exposing it to oxygen must have caused a chemical reaction with whatever violently disgusting things were in there… yuck!

The next thing to tackle was the stairs. My father was in town helping and he just yanked that carpet right off the stairs. I’m really glad he did cause I don’t think I had it in me. I know that it is a high traffic area and you need to tack it down well but COME ON! Are there elephants walking down the stairs trying to pull off the carpet? What was funny though is that there were two layers of carpet on the steps. Who lays carpet over carpet? The second layer was this old orangey colored stuff that looked like bloody vomit. I’m sorry, but it did. Unfortunatley we didn’t get a picture of it, so sad… However once we pulled it up we discovered what happens to active 40 year old underpadding - just in case you didn’t know - it turns to powder and sticks to the wood. Wow, it was riduclous. We weren’t sure what to do. We didn’t really get to it until we moved in because there were so many people traipsing through the place it wasn’t somewhere we could really get at. So once everyone was gone, Ted got to it. He used my painters tool (it was a gift from Sherri for my birthday - great gift, I’ve already used it lots) and the electric sander. I’m not kidding, we had to sand it off. But again, floors are already crappy so it didn’t really take anything away. Huge difference though, now I have to patch up the holes and paint the rise of the steps. It will look good eventually…