We're wanting to dispose of all the carpet in our house. Probably a little at a time, though. If we pull up and throw away the current carpet (believe me, it is NOT worth keeping!), do we *have* to put down laminate/tile immediately, or is there something else (cheaper!) we could do until we can afford to put in laminate/wood/tile/whatever?
It depends on what's underneath it. It's coming on winter, and if there's air leaks under your subflooring, you could end up paying for lack of carpet in heating bills! If you're going for hardwood, take a look at Lumber Liquidators. I bought and put in pre-finished hardwood in an upstairs bedroom using their stuff, it was really inexpensive, but really good quality stuff, nice and thick and beautifully finished, and was a major selling point when we sold the townhouse later! One hint: rent the pneumatic nail thingy. Really. We ended up buying a very loud air pressure thingy, but rented the nail thing you wham with a mallet, after trying the manual one for about four hours. So much easier!
Hadn't thought about air leaks, Cat. Thanks for that! I've heard of Lumber Liquidators. I'll have to look more closely. We would prefer a hardwood, if possible. Thanks for the pneumatic gun hint, too!
I LOVE that place! We did a medium sized bedroom for about $350, really good, thick pre-finished hardwood, and it came out disgustingly beautiful, I was patting myself on the back for weeks! lol Well, I say we did it, but mainly it was me, so I figured I deserved my self-patting. And if I can do it, anybody can! We did borrow a friend's fancypants saw, though, which made the cuts a lot easier.
I would suggest before you pull a whole room of carpet up, you pull it back in a non-conspicuous area (closet, under a piece of furniture, someplace that can be easily nailed back) and check out the subflooring. You might be surprised to find what's under there. I don't know if there would already be hardwood (wouldn't that be great!) but you never can tell until you look.
Our house flooded in the Spring, and we had no choice but pull up everything down to the subfloor. It was warm, thank goodness...but, it was still drafty! We discovered several layers of flooring that we never knew existed! (mostly old linoleum) I can also recommend Lumber Liquidators. You can find good, quality hardwood at decent prices!
When my dad died, we completely repainted and redid the kitchen and bath, and we also pulled up the green and blue shag carpets that had been original to the house, so we could sell for the best price. Under the ugly carpets, we discovered that there was the most gorgeous blond hardwood underneath. Couldn't believe we hadn't done it far sooner!
Normally, I would totally agree with that, but this house is fairly new (about 5 years old) and the guy who built it has already told us that there's just plywood under the carpet, so I don't see any point in it
One things for sure plywood is not a very good flooring for any amount of time. I would leave the carpet in place until you have the funds to replace it room by room. Although it may be really poor it may make your situation worse by trying to replace it too quickly.
