From Carpet to Engineered Hardwood Floors

I’ve always loved the look and feel of carpet, yet I truly hate how it traps dirt and odors. This carpet removal was a project that was in the works for a while, but I kept putting it off. I knew I wanted to go from carpet to engineered hardwood floors and had already purchased the flooring that I wanted to put down. Sadly, the unopened boxes were stacked up in my dining room for almost 2 years just staring at me every time I walked by. But now, no more excuses… it’s go time! First step, clear out the room.

CARPET REMOVAL:

This room was my home office for the first 16 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Other than that and the occasional houseguest, it hasn’t been used much in the 14 years that I’ve owned the house. So, the carpet was seemingly in pretty good shape and I wasn’t expecting the removal to generate too much dust. But I was very, very wrong! It was so much dirt & dust flying around that I had to put on a mask and goggles to get through it. And I vacuum and shampoo my carpets regularly, but still the underside of the carpet was absolutely filthy.

But aside from the dirt, the removal process was pretty easy. I simply cut the carpet into 2 to 3-foot wide strips, rolled up each strip, and duct taped each roll. Fortunately, I had a friend who needed some scrap carpet, so I didn’t need to make a trip to the dump to get rid of it.

SLAB PREP:

The carpet pad came up easily but left adhesive residue on the concrete slab, so it took some time to scrape that all up. The hardest part of the removal process was prying up the tack strips around the perimeter of the room that holds the carpet down. It took a lot of prying and pulling, but I managed to get all the tack strips up. The next problem was patching the holes where the tack strip nails were. That was simple, and it didn’t take too long for the concrete patches to dry.

INSTALLATION:

The new flooring I selected was an engineered hardwood in 5“ wide x 24” long planks. It was designed to be laid in either a herringbone pattern, block pattern, or a straight strip pattern. I decided to go with a block pattern that groups the planks in blocks of 5 with a 90-degree rotation between blocks. It’s important to keep the first row of blocks straight. After that, the installation process was pretty simple.

The total installation only took a half day and before I knew it, I had gone from carpet to engineered hardwood floors and had a new floor that I absolutely LOVE!