Carpet removal and dead bodies behind walls :: Llama and Lamb :: Personal blog of Rachel and Stephen

Carpet removal and dead bodies behind walls

We took possession at closing (the REO seller didn’t even show up for the signing) and went to work two days later. The first action I took was to buy a dehumidifier.The humidity was 75% when we took possession. We have had the rainiest summer in close to 50 years in Indiana, so we were not surprised. We were surprised that that basement did flood while we were purchasing the house. A week later, the humidity has lessened to below 50 percent. Since the house has a sump pump, I was able to keep the dehumidifier running constantly by bypassing the dehumidifier’s water tank and connecting a plastic tubing emptying into the sump pump. Although there were parts and there were no directions on how to attach tubing, so I ending up dissembling part of the machine.

The majority of the carpet was a stained, dirty, and musty gray-brown carpet. We could see that under most of the carpet was hardwood and planned to remove it. I bought gloves and paper masks from from the Ace Hardware just up the road and begin slicing the carpet. In the first two bedrooms, the carpet was not tacked down. It was loosely adhered with masking tape in one room. As I mentioned in the last post, there was carpet in the bathroom. I pulled this carpet up close to last to reveal pink and blue speckled asbestosis tile. It took multiple nights to remove the upstairs carpet and tack strips. I learned that you need at least a foot long “WonderBar.” The breakthrough came when an associate at Lowe’s told me that I wouldn’t damage the floor by slamming the pry-bar into the tasking strips.

Floor scraping to remove clay-filled padding

When we pulled up the gray carpet, we found yellow rubber padding. In general, rubber carpet padding is good. The problem with our padding is that it is cheap rubber padding with clay filling. Over time with the right amount of heat and traffic, clay filled padding will melt into your hardwood floor. Consider scraping fifteen feet of gun off a floor. In the hallway, Rachel scraped for hours with a putty knife slowly down the hall. We even tried ammonia solutions (we read it on the web) and were considering acetone (think nail polish). Thankfully, one of our friends who works at a flooring contractor suggested a floor scraper. The floor scraper was a great idea. It is similar to a large putty knife on a broomstick, and it reduced the time it took to scrape the wall by hours. A floor scraper is also nice for puling up padding staples.

Carpet around the chimney

There was a type of green carpet in one of the bedroom closets that I had yet to remove. I had tried once before, but it felt as if the carpet was laid underneath the wall in the closet. I almost pulled the grips off my pliers trying to pull it out.

We had determined early on that half the closet was taken up by the fireplace flute. This green carpet appeared to continue until the wall toward the flute. I finally decided after I practically shredded the carpet that I needed to dismantle the drywall around the flute. I’m sure this is against fire codes–probably multiple ones.

Removing walls in a recently purchased house is a little scary–especially if you’ve seen the Columbo episode, Columbo Cries Wolf, where the bad guy buries his lover in the wall between the studs after faking her “first murder.” Well, there were no dead bodies behind this wall. Just carpet! It appears that when the chimney flute was installed, the contractors cut our a circle in the floor and the carpet. This means that the carpet is only a few inches from the hot flute! It also means that I couldn’t remove all the carpet, since it was under a studded wall. I tried my best to dice the carpet as close to the wall as possible which shredded it and its padding.

More photographs

Below are some photographs of Rachel and I removing the carpet from the stairs. Carpet remove is fairly easy. It’s the staples and tack strips that are the hard work.

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