About Carpet

After you have finished ripping out carpet, you will find that your floor is infested with these:

and these:

That picture is not nearly ominous enough.

That picture is more like it. If you ever tear out carpet, your floors instantly become lava. Just like when you were a kid. Only, unlike when you were a kid, this new lava-floor will actually make your feet bleed.

Pulling the staples out is not hard, but it is very tedious. You take needle-nose pliers (or whatever your preferred grabbing device is) and forcibly remove them from the subfloor. There are usually one hundred million of them, so be prepared and wear some gloves. Unless you think blisters are a good look.

Tack strips are harder to remove, but there are fewer of them. I used the Wonder Bar (sounds of trumpets!),
and a hammer. Pound the prying tool under the tack strip and pry. It helps to pry right where it's nailed down, otherwise the tack strip breaks.

When we talked to the helpful Blue hardware store sales associate, she kindly informed us we SHOULD NOT remove the tack strips if we planned to have new carpet installed. The carpet installers will just charge you to have the tack strips re-installed (hooray for saving money and doing less work! Hardly ever do these things overlap in this way). By the way, I also learned that putting carpet onto tack strips as a way of installing it is called "Power Stretch", which is awesome.