Tearing Up Old Carpet

Go to a corner of your carpeting and run a standard screwdriver between the edge of the wall and carpet.

Tearing up old carpet.

Pull back the carpeting until the entire rug can be rolled up removed from your home and placed in a dumpster. Carpet removal costs 1 to 1 50 per square foot including labor cleanup and waste disposal. Pull up a few feet of carpet and fold it over. Just grab the carpet with pliers and pull.

The average hourly rate is 60 per hour so expect to pay 180 in total for a contractor to remove and dispose of 12 by. Keep both hands on the knife to avoid cutting a free hand. Continue pulling until you ve separated the carpet entirely from one wall. One way to do this is to lift the carpet away from the floor as you cut.

Use a utility knife or carpet knife to slice the carpet into manageable strips and roll the strips up as you go. Roll or fold the strip secure with duct tape and remove it from the room. This equals 48 to 72 per hour because it usually takes 3 hours to remove carpet from a 12 by 12 foot room including extracting the tack strips and staples. Use pliers to grab the carpet and pull it away from the subfloor.

Fold the carpet over for easy cutting and slice it into narrow strips. Then grab the carpet by hand and continue to pull it up along an entire wall. Continue pulling up carpet a few feet at a time and cutting it into easy to handle strips. Roll up the strips and tape them for easy handling.

If you are trying to salvage the floor underneath make sure you do not cut grooves in the floor with the knife. Pull up and dispose of the foam padding. After you ve rolled up the old carpeting and removed it from the room you ll finally get a good look at the subfloor and any surprise damage that the carpet may have been hiding. If the pliers aren t cutting it you can also use a small crow bar to pry it back.

To detach the carpet from the tack strip that holds the carpet in place along walls start in a corner.