Pulling up Carpet - what can we do?

13 years ago

I seem to have lost the post I wrote earlier!

We just bought a 70s house with pretty dirty wall-to-wall berber carpet. The living room and dining area have hardwood under the carpet, but the hallway and 3 bedrooms (11x12, 11x14, 10x11) have particle board directly under the carpet pad. We have to pull up the carpet because my youngest is allergic to dust mites.

Can we buy just a slap-down tile that's cheap enough and not terribly off-gassing or would it be less expensive to paint? We only have 6 days now to do this before we move in.

What would be the low-budget, green options that don't require much a huge amount of work? We have to pack our rental with 2 kids and move everything and it's the holiday season if that gives you an idea of our time availability. Both my husband and I are on vacation until the 3rd of Jan. so we have a lot of time that we would not otherwise have.

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Comments (3)

glennsfc
13 years ago
It is the particle board that will determine what you can or cannot do regarding flooring. You can float almost anything over the stuff, but adhering a vinyl product or attaching any other flooring material to it would be a recipe for failure.

You could paint it now with a good (not oilbase) deck paint and then decide later what to do about the particle board layer. Is this double construction? Or, is the particle board the only material applied over the floor joists?
pharaoh
13 years ago
I would remove all the carpeting before moving in. Leave it as it is (making sure all nails have been pulled out).
After you move in, install new hardwood floors over the particle board if it is in good condition. This is a DIY project. use prefinished engineered or solid wood. You can get it from LL for less than $3 per sq ft.
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teapot100
Original Author
13 years ago
Thank you both for the advice. We have pulled up 2/3 of the carpet in one bedroom and thankfully, it's already painted (particle board) so we'll just prime it and then re-paint it. I believe it's double construction. We're going to pull up the carpet in the living room today before we move all the furniture tomorrow and while we know that there's hardwood floor under there, I hope there are no other big surprises!

We've decided to prioritize the living room carpet and packing and moving while leaving the work on the bedroom and hallway floors to after we move in. We might even spring for hardwood floors after all.