Many installers glue carpet down to floors, especially concrete floors. It keeps the carpet from moving around but there are hiccups to this method. The big downfall is that the carpet that is most likely to be glued down is foam-backed and because traffic on carpet is never equal after a while the foam may begin to come loose from the carpet backing. This caused bulges and movement in the carpet which leads to bunching. This is because the foam is now sticking to the subfloor.
Removal
- This works best with 2 people
- Use a particle mask and goggles
To remove glued down carpet, either foam-backed or not, clean out everything on the floor in the room. Then start at one corner and pry up the corner with a pry bar and pull on it (Be careful. The carpet may be heavily glued and you don’t want to pull a muscle in your back). If the carpet comes off easily then just keep pulling until it’s all off.
If it doesn’t want to come easily then you can cut it into 1′ – 2′ strips before attempting to take it up. You’ll need to have someone to hold up the ends and pull while you use an ice scraper or square-mouth shovel to scrape between the subfloor and the carpet backing. If the backing is foam it has probably lost its consistency and can “explode” in puffs of black powder. This is why it’s good to have the mask and goggles. Any backing that sticks to the floor will have to be scraped until it’s off otherwise there will be mounds which might affect the surface of the new flooring.
For extreme cases you may have to rent a scraping machine from a flooring place but in most domestic situations the carpet will come up with manual scraping.
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