The Shop Floor: Removing the Carpeting

I wish that we hadn't gotten rid of the carpet.  I am not sorry that we had taken it out of the basement, because we had to, but I wish we would have kept it and found a way to use it somehow, because it was a really nice carpet.  Really nice.  It was a little older, but it was a high quality product and it was like walking on a comfortable gym mat without all the dried wrestler sweat and shoe marks.  I would have liked to use it somewhere in some capacity or at least found someone who could have used it because it really was pretty nice, aside from the cat puke stain and paint flecks we let get on it because we knew it was going away.

     As it were, we had determined early on that the carpet wasn't totally glued down all throughout the room, which was a really good thing because that would have caused a ton of extra work.  One of the things about doing a tile floor on existing cement is that you can't have any adhesive or paint on the cement because it effects the bonding of the quickset that holds the tile to the floor.  So had the carpet been adhered at spots all around the room there would have been a lot of scraping to be done.  The easiest way to determine this is to go to a lot of random spots around the carpet and trying to lift it up.  if it lifts you are in business, and it is okay if it sticks around the edges. 

The basement before carpet removal.  Notice the painting is done and we allowed paint to spill on the carpet because we knew that we were going to remove the carpet.

     Removing the carpet was easy, okay?  Really easy.  I just started in a corner and I began pulling.  That's not true.  I actually began in the hallway because that was the one place where I needed to make a cut, and to be honest I screwed it up.  I cut with a straight edge exactly along the place where I wanted the carpet to stop and the floor to begin, which was right under where the door would be.  Wrong move.  I am not going to include this in the "lessons learned" section because it is a small thing: cut it so there is more carpet than you want, because you don't know what is underneath and you can always trim some.  In my case, I cut it a little bit short and I found out that I just missed a joint in the tacking strips, which would have been the perfect place to cut it.

The hallway: where it all began.

But I cut it.  I used a normal, everyday utility knife, what I grew up calling an Exact-o knife.  And I went slowly because I didn't know what I would fine under the carpet.

     What I found was all the signs of professional installation. The carpet itself was covering a typical carpet pad, the kind that is sort of mottled and doesn't even come out cleanly.  The carpet was held down by some of those wooden tacking strips with a million billion nails facing upward so that the carpet weave just sticks to them, and the strips themselves were nailed into the concrete with those masonry nails that are installed by essentially shooting them into the concrete with a .22.  The pad was inside of the strips and was glued down to the floor just around the edges.

A couple of images of what I found under the carpet.  In the top photo you can clearly see the carpet, pad, and tacking strips.  Below, a close up of the strips showing the heavy-duty masonry nails.  The duct tape is where there is a cut in the pad from when it was originally installed, but you can see in the top of the bottom picture that my cut missed the joint in tacking strips by an inch or two.

     What really made my heart sink when I ripped the first bits of carpet and padding up from the hallway was that the floor was painted.  It was painted with the same thick grey paint that covers the floor in my laundry/utility room, and I was not impressed.  The problem is that the quickset mortar that one uses to attach tile to a concrete floor generally doesn't adhere well to paint.  One of two things usually happens: either the mortar won't adhere to the paint, or the paint flakes off the concrete eventually so the tiles don't set right.  There are two ways to remedy this situation: lay a cement-board floor over the existing concrete, or completely scrape and sand the paint off.  I was not looking forward to that, because I didn't have the cash on had to get the relatively expensive cement board, and I didn't feel like being on my hands and knees scraping the entire basement.

The painted hallway floor, with carpeting still on the floor in the main room.

     So that is what I found, and I immediately began to remove it, and this is where I sort of have some regrets.  In order to make it easier for me to remove and haul away, I decided to cut up the carpet into squared and bind them with twine or whatever.  I wish I would have just rolled it up and found a use for it, or saved it for another time.  That is the deeply repressed hoarder inside of me peeking out, I guess.  Anyway, I cut the carpet into squares, pulled them off the tacking strips and floor, and ripped up the padding underneath.  The padding, where it was glued down, stuck.  But under the bulk of the room was a nice surprise: an unpainted floor.

In the process of removing the carpet, notice the carpet, the pad, and the bare floor with no paint.

     That was big.  I found no paint.  What I hypothesize - and there is no real way to test this - is that at one time the basement was configured differently than it is now.  Currently we have a main room into which the stairs and the outside door lead, and then looking at the stairs to the left there is a utility and laundry room where the furnace, water heater, etc. is located, and to the right there is the above mentioned hallway, which leads to a bathroom and a non-bedroom (because it doesn't have an escape window).  I believe that the "bedroom" and bathroom were later additions, and that historically the basement only had two rooms - the main finished room which today is the shop, and the a giant utility room that took up half the basement.  Hence the fact that the paint stopped at the end of the hallway.  I was relieved.
    What I did find in lieu of paint on the floor in the main room was a very evident pattern of squares - 12" by 12" - the exact size of the tile I was to be putting down.  I told Jim about it and he asked if the pattern was in a sort of yellow looking stuff.  As you can see in the photo below it clearly is.  He told me that there was probably asbestos tile down there are one point, and what I was seeing was the leftover bits of the underside of the tile and the adhesive used to adhere them to the floor.  Take a look:


The pattern on the main room floor, showing where there used to be asbestos tiles - which was common for the age of the house.



    The next big issue that I had, once I started pulling up the carpet and pad, was the tacking strips the surrounded the room where the carpet used to be attached, and the pieced of pad that were still sticking to the floor.  Getting the tacking strips up was easy enough: a pry bar wedged under them with a hammer usually broke them up and they came right off.  But the nails wouldn't come out.  You can usually break those nails off right at the floor with a small sledge hammer, or even a regular hammer, if you hit them just right.  Usually.  Well, this house seems to be unusual, and I guarantee you that I wasn't hitting them right, and the first couple that I tried resulted in big chunks of concrete coming up with them.  So I just borrowed an angle grinder from Jim and ground them off - over a hundred of them - down to level with the concrete.

     The pad that was stuck to the floor came of even more easily with a simple scraper, and the scraper did the trick on the bulk of the rest of the stuff on the floor.  The scraping was the longest part, in fact.  I spent three nights after work scraping on that floor, and I still didn't get it as clean as I wanted it.  But it was doable.  The paint proved to be the hardest: parts of it flaked off with no problem, but I wasn't able to get most of it off before I ran out of time.  I decided to take the chance that the paint was adhered well enough and that there was enough of it removed that the tile would stick.  I was out of time, but the carpet was removed.  My Dad would arrive the next day to lay the tile.  But that is for another post.