How to Remove Carpet in One Easy Lesson ... NOT.

It's not really hard, but it is far from easy on the hands, shoulders, knees,  well, pretty much the whole body.

The house has hardwood floors all through, and the ones in the living room, dining room and hallway have never been exposed.  Wall-to-wall carpet was put down the house was built in 1949 and have been down since.  At some point, and I would imagine this happened when the master bedroom was converted from two smaller bedrooms, the carpet there was removed and not replaced.  For some reason the carpet in the front bedroom, which was mine when I was still living at home was removed also.

I decided that since hardwood floors are terribly trendy now, and since it is easier to clean up doggy piddle and kitty throw-up from wood than it is from carpet, that I'd remove the extremely dirty carpet and give the hardwood a chance to shine.

I started in the dining room.  Having never done this before,
I just took a leap of faith ( or experienced a psychotic moment, your choice), and started by pulling an edge loose.  Carpet is attached all around the edge of the room to something called a 'Tackless' strip.  Named by someone with a skewed sense of humor (or absolutely no sense of reality ... your choice again) this strip of wood is filled with tiny tacks.  Beware.  They are sharp and they are waiting for you.   Think of them a little flat, wooden Zombies who want to eat your flesh if at all possible.  This is your only warning to be careful when pulling up the carpet edges.
Once I got a piece loose, I took a matt knife and cut the carpet into a manageable strip.  It's just cloth when you get right down to it, and is not really difficult to cut.  In fact, if you are going in the right direction, you can rip it evenly along a crosswise thread once you've started your cut.  Once I've cut a strip, I roll it and used some strapping tape that I had to secure the roll.  Duct tape works also, I just happened to have the other handy.

Under the carpet you'll have some sort of padding.  This is stapled to the wood where a sheet of the padding ends.  You'll be pulling up lots of staples, but this is actually the easiest part of the job.  Some of my staples had rotted and to get the bits out of the floor, I used a small tool called a "nipper".  Very handy.  If you have , as I did when removing those Tackless strips mentioned earlier, nails that are so old the heads rip off when the strip is pulled up, you can grab the body of the nail with the nipper and use that tool as a sort of plier to pull the nail up and out!

Removing the Tackless strips is a bigger job.  I think that's why I actually enjoyed the staple removal!  These strips must all be pulled up as gently as possible to avoid damaging the wood floor.  I  have a wonderful tool that looks a bit like a screw-driver with a pry head.  I happened to buy it years ago for some strange reason and had never had a use for it till now.  "Packratness" runs in my family genes, and for once this was a very good trait to have inherited.  You need a very thin pry to get the wood strip up enough to insert your larger pry-bar.  This is going to take several things: (a) the right tools, (b) sore hands from using those tools, (c) sore shoulders, (d) blood.  But you can do it!

Now your lovely hardwood floors have a chance to shine again!

Here's the dining room right after I got the carpet up.  I'm hoping to have the floors re-waxed.  Waxing was used when the house was built, and I love the look of it.  That will come soon.