Removing glued down carpet underlay

TheBigCheese

TheBigCheese

TheBigCheese

Soldato
Joined
6 Sep 2005
Posts
3,781
Hi folks

Some bright spark previously thought it would be a cracking idea to put a thick pile carpet in an office I'm now using...fair enough at the time except now that I come to remove the rancid thing I pull the carpet up and find he's glued the carpet to the underlay and the underlay to the concrete floor...muppet

Any suggestions on the best way of removing glued down underlay? I've googled but all I can find is for carpets that are glued down and leave a mess on the concrete...this has underlay completely stuck to the concrete :(

Many thanks in advance for any useful thoughts :)
 
I would suggest a lot of elbow grease, good luck with that mess pal.


Have you managed to seperate the carpet from the underlay? might be worth going at it with something like a garden hoe to scrape as much as you can from the concreate.
 
Metal paint scraper + elbow grease + sore knees - hours of your life = win

Been there.
 
When my sister moved into her new house they had the exact same thing.

We used a paint/wallpaper stripper electrical one:

remover.jpg


& a bit of elbow grease as Lamo says.
 
Yeah, it looks like I can pull the carpet away from it, just the underlay that's completely stuck.

Awww...elbow grease? That's soooo expensive (in time). Thanks for your suggestions with it though, a wallpaper scraper might just do the job!

I was going to put carpet tiles down, I wonder if I can put them directly down over the underlay successfully...?

*edit* Wow another three posts in the time it took me to write that! :D The wallpaper stripper sounds like a good idea, I would be very wary of using heat on it though, it's in an office and knowing my luck (ineptitude) I'd set something on fire, cause the building to be evacuated and get told off by a fireman :(
 
Last edited:
We had a similar issue and the glue was rock hard. We found that smacking it with a ball-peen hammer caused it to break free from the floor, then it was a breeze to scrape up. Quite noisy, though.
 
is the underlay actually glued or is it just stuck?
I've found it tends to stick itself to the floor after a few years.

When we had to clear my nan's house after she passed away we ended up using wallpaper scrapers and stiff brooms to remove the underlay that had stuck itself down (it had been down for 20 ood years).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom