De-Carpeting the Staircase

Wise words from Frau Blucher


 

The Staircase of Death is pretty frickin terrifying to use. Each step is about as deep as roughly half your foot, assuming that you're not Sasquatch. And that means that each step is roughly half your foot not deep enough. The handrails offer you about as much support as a dolphin in a three-legged race. The stairs were also carpeted to begin with, which seemed to make the journey infinitely more treacherous. We will soon be re-building the stairs to make them more useable but at the moment we're stuck with them so this week I removed the carpet.

This is my first time ever removing carpet and I'm pretty sure starting with a staircase is the hardest way to go but whatever. I live the hardcore life.

What I did:
  • Starting at the bottom stair, I pulled the carpet off with a mix of tools until one did the job. Wear a face mask for this - it's disgusting. 
    Once the carpet came off the bottom step the rest were easy. 
  • I pulled off the underlay and used pliers to remove the staples holding it down. 
  • The back and sides of each step had one or two tack strips (the wooden strips with nails poking out that hold the carpet down), and the backboard had two tack strips as well. They are nailed into the steps. I convinced them off by hammering the chisel underneath the middle of  each strip, trying not to snap the strip but to lift it. Some of the time the nails would just lift straight out of the wood with the strip.  
    Tack strips
  • The difficult part was when some just would not lift up at all, so I ended end just chipping away with the chisel and hammer to break the tack strips into pieces. They're made of plywood so it's not too hard. Once I had broken away enough to get to a nail, I could usually lift it out using the pokey end of the hammer and take away a section all at once. 
  • Once each step was done I vacuumed it and removed all the extra nails that were randomly nailed in all over the place with the hammer. 
  • Voila! How cool is this paint job I uncovered? 

Here's a video to show how it worked in case my instructions are rubbish:


Cost: $0
Time taken: 8 hours (about twenty minutes per step)
Tools: Hammer, chisels, pliers, screwdriver, scraper multi-tool, gloves, face mask, vacuum.

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