r
Carpet Removal :Image Courtesy Home Depot
A beautiful wall and floor carpeting improves the visual outlook of your home. But after a period of time, you want to remove it due to plenty of reasons. If you are planning to remove wall and floor carpeting, you require a systematic approach, some tools and most importantly, lot of patience. If you follow some guidelines and do little bit planning, this job could be easy and everyone can do it on self, thus saving valuable money and time.
Before initiating, take a paper and pencil and write down few things, such as how could you locate the starting point in room, what tools you need to remove the carpet and gather other stuff like hand gloves, safety glasses and face mask to protect you from expected chemical allergies, fumes and dust. When you start removing wall and floor carpeting, look around and find electric wiring to avoid any disaster.
Removing wall and floor carpeting is tricky especially when you have hardwood floor. So, first find out the way of its attachment to the floor, which could be of two types:
• By adhesive
• By nails (Tack Strips)
In first case observe the color of adhesive which could be either dark brown or yellow. If adhesive is dark brown (which is generally tar based), remove it with mineral spirit or if yellow (which is common carpet glue), remove with any general purpose adhesive. A general purpose remover softens the glue and eases the removal with putty knife.
In second case, use following tools like crowbar, utility knife, pinch-nose pliers and good quality hand gloves to remove nails. Keep away children from your place of work so as to avoid a possible hazard from nails or chemical.
Removing wall and floor carpeting has an important step and that is cutting. Always start from corners and try to cut carpet into manageable pieces by utility knife, which is quite a handy tool for that purpose. Be careful when you have hardwood floor because a simple negligence can damage the floor and may also hurt you. When you finish cutting, store the pieces and transport them.
In this guide about removing wall and floor carpeting, we will further discuss about removing wall carpet, which is a somewhat difficult job but again planning makes it easy. Again start with corners and pull the carpet softly. You can use pray bar to remove tack strips and continue this process till all the carpet is removed. Next you can roll it and take away from room.
Some tips that you may find quite useful in removing wall and floor carpeting are given below:
• Always wear hard sole shoes, safety glasses, hand gloves and face mask to avoid any physical risks. While fumes in the chemical compounds of carpet glues can cause serious respiratory problems, rusty nails could cause Tetanus.
• Always keep one assistant with you. This could be your friend or spouse.
• Always keep good quality tools to ensure comfort and make your job easy.
• Always do some groundwork and study the electrical and telephone wiring plan!
• Always keep vacuum cleaner with you to help you in removing dust and debris.
• Carpet adhesives are highly inflammable. Therefore, properly clean them and then use any electrical appliances to avoid fire hazard.
If you find this brief guide on how to remove wall and floor carpeting helpful, why not bookmark this article and share with your friends. Your comments are welcome too, over my Face book wall or the Twitter account as below!
