Removing Carpets

As we have been in the house since June 6th, I knew even before then, that we would have to take out all of the carpets. There was old shag or sculpted carpet in the entire 2nd floor aside from the bathroom and thankfully, not the steps, as well as carpet in the downstairs bedroom.

 

I have 3 cats. Cats and carpet are not a good combination even tho' cats do use the litter box, they also tend to throw up hair balls now and again and at times they may have accidents or as with my half-Persian, have pooplets that might fall off or like with any animal really, they can get ill and have issues.
The problem arises when they have their accidents on your carpet and it goes straight down into the padding and sometimes even into the wood. It is very difficult to near impossible to get that odor out or to remove any trace of the urine or whatnot from your carpet. There are cleaners out there but when you have padding under that carpet, it is still difficult.

 

Not only the pet issue but there is also a lot of other issues that comes along with carpets: allergies, dust, dirt, and food and liquid spills can get trapped within the fibers of your carpet. If you can get a great vacuum to get them out, awesome! If not, it will build up and carpet fibers get worn, etc etc.

 

Carpets are not made to last for the long term.

 

I found the better thing to do instead of having carpets installed, is to get those throw carpets. That way you can lift them up, clean them from the back side, you can clean the floor under them and you are able to get messes out of them so much easier.

 

Some people just toss carpet down, some are taped, some tacked or seamed to another. This carpet was tacked down. I've had carpet taped down to a terrazzo floor when I lived in Florida. That was in base housing on a military installation and the problem with that was that when you move in there, any changes you make, you have to remove and put the house back to how it was when you moved in. So when the time came to move away, we had to remove the carpet and then there it was. Carpet tape residue. My good friend David had come over and I still remember to this day of how he was scraping it off with a razor blade to get it off. What a pal!

 

This carpet however in this house was tacked down. It came up easier than expected as some rooms it was just placed there and the baseboard was not utilized to help hold it in tact.

 

Now, before I go any further, I want to say when we were thinking about having those floors redone, carpet removed and then put in that new kind of porcelain tile that looks like hardwood, we thought of Home Depot and that they do install. Awesome!? Well yes and no. So I am going to start this series of Home Improvement topics and to catalog the issues and events as they have been unfolding.

 

For now, we'll focus on the carpet part of it.

 

So anyway, as you may have read of where I was having issues in finding any local tradesmen who were willing to come up here to help get some items addressed, I did manage to find an excellent electrician who had an assistant with him who ends up is like a Jack of all trades! :) Love it!

I'll get into the importance of getting to know your local tradesmen in another post.

 

But Jack, we'll call him for now, offered to take the carpets as he could use them himself. So I agreed and he came out and pulled them up and took them away, including the padding! Awesome! There are some carpet nails then that he is removing as well.

You may not realize it, but carpet really helps to absorb sound. Without them in here, the place now echoes more.

 

When I went to Home Depot to put together this huge project as it encompasses the whole second floor, well over 1,000 sq feet, we sat down with the people at my local store and we proceeded to pick out everything :) Everyone there is so friendly and helpful! They put together a great plan and then they set up for the payment to open up a credit card and we'd be able to have 2 year no interest as well. Then they set up a date. Now I was up here at the house for 3 weeks ahead of time before we officially moved up, so that I could see about having the floors done before we had any furniture to move around. Good idea! Except....yea, there is an except....Home Depot was booked and they were not able to get a date until 26 July! This was early June. Yikes! So they said they would try to get me in by the 18th and later, yes they were able to.

 

One thing I realized is that if you are in a hurry, don't rely on Home Depot.

 

This whole thing hinged on our bathroom upstairs getting done. That was a separate project and so I'll get to that in another post.

 

Home Depot wanted to charge me over $1,000 to take the carpets out and dispose of them. That was way too high when I could have Jack do so and he would take them away as well for nothing and they were going to someone who could use them! So I let Home Depot know they could take that part off cause I was able to remove the carpets and they wouldn't have to.

 

After picking out the tile and grout for the floors and whatnot, the total of the bill was just over $20,000. Yep, that's very expensive. What is nice is not having to pay up front and no interest and then we could just pay it off before then, but ouch! High price tag but we do have a lot of square footage.

 

Still....it's a lot. Well it is down to 19k since Jack removed the carpets.

 

I had hoped I could get both bathrooms done for under 20k as originally we were able to qualify for a project loan through Home Depot at 7% interest. Nice! But as we had issues with the computers there at Home Depot and wanted to get this order in for the flooring as soon as possible, the lady there talked to us about applying for the credit card to make sure we get that install date firmed up. So we did that and then had the flooring put on the credit card instead of the project loan which we saved for the bathrooms.

 

So we then focused on the bathrooms as a separate project.