Have you ripped out carpet and lived on bare floor for a yea

We didn't live with it a whole year, but yeah, we ripped out every single piece of carpet out of our house when we moved in. DH has bad allergies and asthma and whatever was in the carpet was killing his breathing. So we ripped out every room to the subfloor. I painted the sub floor with floor paint. It stayed that way for awhile as we re-did our entire home. It wasn't pretty or perfect but it was do-able and DH's asthma went away. The boys were small so we did put big rugs in their rooms but otherwise we didn't mess with them anywhere else while we were woking on the house. I wanted every dime to go to new floors vs. rugs I wouldn't want to keep later.

You would be so surprised at what comes out of carpet when you pull it up. I was a clean freak --- I THOUGHT --- until we pulled the carpet and all the dust came up with it. Ugh.

When we were refinishing our home we budgeted a room of flooring per month. I can live with just about anything as long as I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I have lived with painted floorboards in my living room for four years. I couldn’t afford new flooring when I moved in. They were gorgeous at first, but four years of a big heavy mutt with sharp claws running and bouncing about have destroyed the paint. The shabby chic look is definitely more shabby these days. However, I want to build bookcases at one end of the room, which will shorten the floor space by 12”, so it makes sense to do that before I add flooring. And I’ve just never got round to organising the bookcases. 😊

I want to rip the carpets up out of our house. It is the house I grew up in and I know that there are beautiful hardwood floors underneath but DH insists that they will have to be refinished blah blah blah. So we live with the holes around the edges for a while.

It depends on how many staples and tacks are in the floor. We pulled out the carpet in the upstairs at our cabin a few years before we ended up basically tearing the whole thing down, and there were SO. MANY. STAPLES. Ugh. I pulled them out for hours and hours over several weekends and never did get them all. I’d be afraid to walk on that floor without shoes.

But now at our deer shack that has always had a painted plywood floor, it’s fine. It needs repainting or something because it’s getting chipped and worn. We’ll probably end up putting down some type of vinyl plank or engineered wood because it’s a smaller room that won’t cost a lot to do and it will really clean up the space.

I did it in a previous house and I was so happy I did. The carpet was there when we moved in and looked clean, and we were good about cleaning/vacuuming and annual deep cleaning do I was not prepared for all the dirt that was under the carpet. It was gross and I swore I’d never have carpet again. (FTR, a lot of the “dirt” was the disintegrating carpet pad) I painted the floor, and because it was the 90s I also stenciled a little 😄😄. I would totally do it again.

I replaced my entire downstairs carpeting a room or two at a time, over the course of a couple of years. It was no problem getting the same laminate flooring each time (I kind of have a thing about that ... I don’t like different flooring in every room, I like it all to match). I even put it in the downstairs bathroom, knowing it probably wouldn’t last there forever.

And sure enough, the toilet started leaking last year and the floor had to go. I wasn’t prepared to redo the floor right away, because I wanted to renovate the bathroom first. Which hasn’t happened yet.  So that bathroom still has the subfloor, which is sort of cardboardy on top of concrete. What I’ve done is cover the entire floor with bath rugs, which I wash frequently. It’s a great look (NOT). But it works until I get around to redoing the rest of the bathroom. Hopefully this spring. 


ETA I want to amend my statement the the floor surface is cardboardy. After all this time, I just now went and poked around it, and I think it’s just the concrete itself. I thought it looked and felt like cardboard, but it really isn’t. 

(ignore me, I’m clearly an idiot)

We did once. We pulled up the old carpet. The original floor was semi decent so we got an area rug to cover the largest bare spot until we could agree on what to do. We ended up getting new flooring over the original because there was too much damage in other areas. It took us about 6 months to agree on something. Half of our house projects end up being put off because we have different opinions. I want the living professionally painted; he doesn't. I want one style of siding; he wants a different one. We can only agree on color (barely).

I detest carpet! RIP THAT UP and out! SO.GROSS!

When we built this house, we did 2400 sq.ft of tile. Wall to wall, ENTIRE house. We also did the back porch which is almost 1,000 sq.ft. I LOVE it!

Growing up, my parents built their own house and we lived on hardwood subfloor for YEARS! I was 11 when we moved in, I'm 46 now and they still have subfloor stairs! It's smooth from years and years of people walking on it. No splinters. It's fine.

Do it! Get rid of that funky carpet.

We did for almost a year when we first moved into our new home. It allowed us to repaint the whole house without worrying about spills or drips. Also we replaced floorboards, added baseboards and remodeled some areas. But I was done with it by a year. We did buy cheap area rugs for the living areas and bedrooms. My in-laws happened to visit us during that time. For years after that (and carpeting the whole house) my father-in-law would often comment on what a good improvement it was to add carpeting. 🙄

I would choose to live with wood floors that need to be refinished than dirty carpet. As a matter of fact, almost my entire home is original 97 year old hard wood that needs to be refinished. It looks better than any old dirty carpet and easier to keep clean.

I’m definitely considering it in our living room. I’m sure there’s some sort of water coming in and maybe I’ll be able to find it with the carpet gone.

A word of caution - before removing any flooring, make sure all of your computers are off and that they are tightly covered with something non-permeable. Over the years we have had 4 clients who had flooring removed or refinished and who didn’t turn off their machines and cover them. All of them had major issues with the machines within just a short while. When we opened the computers, they were filled with dust from the work. One client had his machine fail within hours of having the carpet removed, so the flooring company paid for his new machine and for our time to set it up. They had failed to close off the sections of the house that weren’t being redone, so they had to pay to have everything that had issues replaced.

Marcy

Yep! We have a small sun room that was once a breeze way connecting the main house to the garage. Former owners closed it off. Whatever their dog did to that carpet, our dog did the same. No matter how many times we tried to clean it, the room just smelled. So we ripped out the carpeting to the subfloor then used Kilz paint to seal away the nasty. I put down a large area rug and we love it. Going on 3 years and no plans to change the room now.

If you have plywood subfloors you will definitely want to seal them with something to prevent splinters.

We had our family room carpet ripped out for 3-4 months after we discovered a water leak and lived with just concrete floors until we figured out what to put in there. We were selling, so we waited to see what the realtor suggested we do for resale. But if we had decided to stay, I would of had no problem just living with concrete floors until we could afford to have the full first floor redone with one solid flooring. It was a mix of carpet and tile and to just to remove the tile was $$$ we were NOT willing to put into that house. And thankfully the realtor agreed.

After the carpet and padding were torn out, all that was left was some tack strips along the walls that easily came out. The cracks and glue left behind I could of easily lived with or put a big carpet in the room if I needed to. We didn't think it was a big deal at all.

Have you seen finished concrete floors? I would of totally considered that if it was going to be my forever house!