Tearing Up the Floor

One of the first projects we had to do was tear up the carpet in the living room. We did so a little earlier than expected (as in, we did it our very first hour of being in the house) because I wasn't able to sand the entire baseboard with the carpet covering a portion of it. FYI: I'm sanding all the baseboards because we're priming and painting them all white. What can I say? I love white trim.

So the pictures below show Mike taking the carpet up. First, he cut the carpet right down the middle to make it more manageable to pull up (you should also take into consideration the size pieces your garbage collection will pick up).

In the picture above, you can see the matting underneath the carpet. We had to repeat all the steps to take that up as well. After cutting the carpet, Mike pulled it up and began to roll.

Be careful of the nails along the ends of the carpet - they are EXTRA sharp. I learned this the hard way; I already bumped up against them. Mike was able to pull those out with the back of a hammer and a lot of muscle!

You can see that the picture above was taken AFTER taking out the matting. All those little pieces left are staples with extra matting left. We had to remove them with a pliers (and again some muscle). Also to help my sanding process, Mike removed the quater round from the tiled area so I could sand the entire baseboard on the tiled area.

Our next adventure that I'll post about is our plan to remove the tile that you see along the removed carpet area. THAT was a little harder than planned. Good thing I'm married to a Project Manager (i.e. a world-class construction problem solver)!