Recently purchased a home and need to replace the carpet. While trying to demo the old carpet, we found out they installed a commercial type product glued down to a wood subfloor on the second story.

This stuff won't budge at all. Any tips on an effective way to remove this? Thinking about renting a floor striper, but concerned about damaging the subfloor.

Also looking for recommendations for carpet installers in the west Houston/Katy area.

TIA

Need more info. Maybe a picture or a description.

Questions:

1. How old is that house?
2. Are those painted 5.5" diagonal boards under the carpet or some kind of engineered wood laminate?


If that is some kind of diagonal flooring or subfloor they probably put down a self leveler to apply the carpet so that the little joints didn't project through. Your best bet would probably be to leave it and float it out again before putting new carpet down.

On closer inspection, it appears there is some leveler used but it's just a commercial glue down carpet. On wood, that's going to be hard to remove with a scraper without damaging stuff. You are not going to get the glue off completely. If you are going back with standard residential carpet, you'll just need to leave the glue and skim coat it where it's bad. Get a really good carpet pad, for sure.

Built in '82

It is a 5.5" diagonal boards.

Thanks for your insight.

Well this was a huge pain to do, wife and I did one bedroom and had enough so I picked up some help to finish the other two rooms and the hallway but at least it is done. Took a full day to complete and now need to figure out how to prep and install new carpet.

Let me know if anyone has any good contacts for flooring contractors in the Katy area. We need to install carpet and have some tile flooring to do on the first floor as well.

It's very odd that the subfloor is diagonal sawn lumber instead of plywood, even for the early 80's. Good luck. Most flooring guys are probably going to be surprised when they see that in a home.

Builder93 said:

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It's very odd that the subfloor is diagonal sawn lumber instead of plywood, even for the early 80's. Good luck. Most flooring guys are probably going to be surprised when they see that in a home.

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Putting commercial carpet in a bedroom is really weird too... Looks like they used the hardcore adhesive too.

Nobody in their right mind would glue carpet down to any subfloor. Sounds like some skinflint found some commercial carpet on the side of the road and had some heavy duty glue aging in their warehouse and threw it at your house.

Glad you got it up--you got the best possible result.