Carpet removal

If you've never done it, removing carpet is quite therapeutic. The first weekend after our move-in, I ripped out most of the upstairs carpet. It was either an ugly blue carpet seen in this picture from before our closing date. Or it was a boring offwhite carpet that was like burber and just not very soft.
The process basically involved a carpet knife and a lot of pulling. I cut the carpet and underlying padding into strips that were about 4-5 feet wide. I then pulled them away from the baseboards and tacking strip until the carpet came off. Then it was a matter of just rolling them up. After carrying the first roll into the garage, I soon discovered that I shouldn't roll the whole strip up from one wall to the other. That made it quite heavy. So, I had to unroll some, cut them in half, then roll again. That made carrying them manageable, especially considering that I had to carry them downstairs before going out the garage.



I said the process was therapeutic, but that was only the case while ripping away the carpet. Well, that and the fact that I was able to get out of cleaning. You can really take your aggressions out on it. I only had to be careful to make sure I didn't rip up the tacking strips, because we plan to carpet again and don't want to have to pay for that part of it.
All in all, it took me about 6 hours to rip up about 1500 sq ft of carpet, and we still have 2 piles of carpet rolls in our garage (I manage to squeeze about 4 rolls into the garbage every week). Here's a picture of the end result. Coincidentally, one of the first things we unpacked were our slippers.