What is the best way to remove carpet that has been glued down in a bedroom?
The house our daughter is purchasing has this glued carpet in one of the bedrooms.
From the description, it's possibly an indoor/outdoor carpet or an industrial type carpet rather than plush.
Pull it up and scrape off the residue. An ice scraper on a long stick is handy so you don't have to bend.
Depending on how aggressive the adhesive is, this can be a monster job. Professional installers use hooked blades on utility knives to slit the carpet into strips, then they pull up the individual strips. If they have to cut the carpet into 2' by room length strips, that's what they do. If that doesn't work, they cut it into 1' strips. If that is still too tough, they continue slitting to smaller strip sizes until they get to a size that is managable.
In the basement playroom in my old house, someone had gotten extremely generous with the adhesive. I had to cut the 800 sf of carpet into 4 to 6" strips to remove it. It took chunks of concrete with it. It probably took me 20 man hours to pull everything up.
KB
Oh my! This sounds like it could be a lot of hard work ... a monster job for sure......to get the glue up. I'm now wondering if it's possible that renting a steamer and steaming the carpet/glue beforehand, would help remove the carpet and glue easier (somewhat like removing wallpaper but a bit more complicated probably. Sounds messy too, but maybe it would loosen the glue better than dry scraping).
And, I am very thankful for each response to my request for information about this dilemma.
As others have said, it depends on how strongly it's glued down, and also what the floor underneath is like (as this determines how aggressive you need to be).
The house I just bought had carpetting in all the rooms (except for the bathroom); luckily, it was only glued down in two of them. In one bedroom, it was very easy to tear off, though a lot of residue was left behind (on a hardwood floor, so I haven't been too aggressive in scraping/cleaning it yet); in the other, the carpet was cemented to linoleum, which was cemented to the plywood underneath. I ended up wedging a garden pitchfork in under the carpet and rocking it, using the leverage to break everything free. After the carpet (taking most of the linoleum with it) was gone, I went back through with scrapers to get rid of the remaining glue. Tearing the carpet out by myself took a couple of hours; two of us were able to finish scraping in a couple more.
I don't think I'd recommend steaming the carpet--if the glue re-liquified, and then got all over you, it could be a royal pain, given how stongly it was adhering to my kitchen floor.
-D.
To be honest with you, I'm an engineer for the world's largest carpet manufacturer. I called in every resource I could to find a better method than "brute force" to remove my own glued down installation.
The only helpful suggestion I recieved is that there is a machine that can be rented which has a vibrating blade and will act something like a sod cutter and remove carpet glued to a concrete floor. Some rental places have the machine, some do not. Try calling a local carpet dealer and see if they can point you in the right direction. Don't try using this machine on anything other than a concrete floor.
KB
Again, thank you to all who responded. I understand that underneath is a sub-floor, so, the pitchfork suggestion definitely sounds like a worthy tool to try in this situation (although, I would think that taking pictures of the person(s) with pitchfork in hand during this removal process would be called for........Maybe even a warning sign would be good safety procedure too.....Beware! Pitchfork in use in a bedroom!).
Yea, I kinda thought that steaming the carpet and glue might cause a problem.......if it were to go wrong with the glue re-liquifying,........it might make a good "I Love Lucy" episode though!!!
CJ
Assuming the glue can be reached by a liquid you can try liberly wetting a section with Krud Kutter which I bought at home depot to remove glue from vinal tile after ripping out a rug. took 24 hours of soaking with a bit of water added now and again to keep floor wet.
I used it full strength and it did not harm wood basebord or vinal. also no smell to speak of.
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