Rip Out that Old Carpet
Rip out that carpet. Get yourself an easy win.
In each of our four house projects so far, we’ve had old carpet to deal with. Nasty. I don’t mind because its removal offers an immediate impact. You can almost see the appraised value dial turning up with its eviction.
Like any good tire kicker we’ve always done the obligatory “let’s see what’s underneath this thing” move when touring a house for the first time, maybe in a closet or wherever there is a loose area. Each time we have discovered hardwood underneath.
I love hardwood floors for their beauty and nostalgia. I also happen to love trees (I was a botany major at Purdue) and wood (the most versatile and sustainable building material available.)
“Who would ever cover these things up??? What were they thinking?” It’s required conversation. I’ll tell you what they were thinking. They thought, “let’s preserve these beautiful homages to forests by covering them up with heavy shag for a couple of decades for the benefit of the future house flipper.”
Every newly discovered hardwood floor is the best possible version of a White Elephant Gift. And the presence of hardwood factors heavily into a buyer’s decision. It’s a major selling point for me. The only house we’ve bought that didn’t have hardwood floors is the one I am sitting and typing in right now, and guess what? We installed hardwood floors. I don’t even care that our dogs have already scratched paths through the kitchen. These floors are unique as the families that live on them. Exactly as they should be.
Back to the shag carpet, though. Anyone that’s removed the shag has experienced the immediate gratification of their removal. Kind of like mowing grass, but way better. And like mowing grass, many carpet extractors have experienced the tickle and itch that comes five minutes later, after decades of dust and dander have found new lungs and skin to colonize. Being a dust-sensitive asthmatic, I learned quickly that this is work to be done with a mask on.
Wrestling a carpet out the door, or down a flight of stairs, quickly warms a person up. The first one that left the door and ended up on the curb of Sycamore Street was soon covered with a layer of fresh, powdery snow. Trash day came and went, more snow came, and still, the carpet sat there, looking stupid. Or maybe it was me that was standing there looking stupid. I called the city to inquire as to why the carpet didn’t get collected by the city.
“Carpet has to be bagged up, sweetheart. It doesn’t matter how many bags. We’ll come get ‘em if they’re bagged up.” I couldn’t follow the logic, but it didn’t matter. We were going to be bagging up a whole house worth of shag in subzero January after dark.
After a quick trip to Rural King to buy heavy-duty 44 gallon trash bags (the first of many boxes,) I dragged my oldest son, Avery, out to start hacking up the shag into strips that we could roll and shove into bags. We were soon heaving and coughing, rolling and shoving, and swearing. But that carpet got bagged, despite stiffening substantially and picking up a good bit of snow and water weight. But the next day, the carpet was gone and no, I never saw it poking up out of the heap at the landfill in my numerous subsequent trips.
No one said flipping would be easy, and we were already looking pretty dumb on day 2. We got the initial dopamine hit from seeing beautifully preserved hardwood flooring throughout the house. Then, after squinting, we could see the thousands of staples left behind. And the strips of carpet tack. Probably these strips were invented and installed as a form of trap for rodents. You install them around the perimeter of a room and when the mice come out of their arched holes in the wall, they get impaled on the spikes.
Well, I wasn’t buyin’ it. They had to go, along with the thousands of staples set out in rows across the floors. I gave my kids a few tools-- flathead screwdrivers and needle nose pliers for the staples, pry bar and hammer for the tack strips-- and got them started. The piles of staples and shards of splintered tack strips accumulated into piles that were guaranteed to puncture skin. A plastic bag, even the heavy-duty ones from Rural King, would prove no match. So far, we were learning about waste management in house flipping in crash course fashion. The bags full of sharps soon resembled a sort of boobie trap for dumpster divers, sure to make them think twice about trying to find treasure in this 44-gallon bag.
For months you’ll find staples that got missed, probably with a finger drawn across the floor or a bare foot (wait: what are you doing barefoot in a construction site?) Once they are all found and evicted, though, you’ve got a carte blanche to turn those floors, pickled for decades under the guise of fashion, into their original beauty and resplendence. For me, it’s the most gratifying part of a renovation. And nothing gets the world talking and gawking like refinished hardwood.
Occasionally someone will have the stupefying idea to put carpet in a bathroom. You know, just in case you want something to absorb and hold all of those bathroom liquids and scents and encourage mold. Go ahead and carpet right around the toilet. How bad could it be? Pretty bad, actually. if you know, you know, and I’m sorry if you know.
In our most recent house purchase, a room had been carpeted in a hurried fashion to cover up some ugly old linoleum flooring. The carpet itself wasn’t offensive; it was brand new, albeit the cheapest carpet money could conceivably buy. After I took the carpet up and set to the task of extracting the old linoleum, complete with large paint spill stains. I found that the linoleum was putting up a bit of fight and so I employed a trick learned from a friend: I took my circular saw and set the blade to a very shallow cut and started making long cuts across the room, maybe 12” apart. This way, the flooring can be more easily pried up. Great idea, right? It is, actually. Except what I did not count on was that under the carpet, linoleum, and thin luan subfloor under that there would be near immaculate hardwood floors, in keeping with the rest of the house. So in the process of removing the linoleum, I cut giant gouges almost all the way across the room. Luckily, I stopped to check before I trashed the whole room. Carpet is the ultimate cover- up! And also, assume nothing about what it is actually covering up!
Each step in the process is a step forward. Most are small and invisible, but carpet removal is like spraying off a muddy truck. Rip it out, bag it up, drag it out, and never look back.