I get quite a number of jobs tearing out carpet, sometimes with the padding and sometimes just the carpet by it’s self. Occasionally the padding under the carpet will be stuck to the wood or concrete floor and will require a lot of scraping to remove. It also takes a great deal of time to remove the tack strips which the carpet is adhered to. Not only do I take up the wood strips but I remove all the tiny nails holding it to the wood or concrete floor. Unlike other haulers I cut the carpet into sections which enables me to pack it more efficiently in my truck. It’s amazing how much carpet can be packed into a space when cut and packed correctly.
I’ve gotten calls to pic up a couple of rooms of carpet that the city’s bulky item pick up wouldn’t take and it’s on the curb. The customer has to get rid of it in a hurry, so when I get a call at seven at night, after they get home from work and discover that the carpet is still on the curb, I get right to it, cutting up all the carpet and padding.This has happened often in the Sherman Oaks area for some reason. People really appreciate the fact that I am on call seven days and nights to remove their trash.
Sometimes the customer will have me demo out the floor tile in the entrance, kitchen and bathroom of the house, condominium or apartment. Removing ceramic and clay tile is some of my favorite work. I also get jobs where the carpet and tile has already been torn out and I simply load it on my truck and haul it away. There are different types of tile and all tile isn’t laid down on the floor the same way. Ceramic floor tile sometimes pops right up with a chisel, and sometimes it comes up in pieces and can require a great deal of work to break with a sledge hammer and chisel with a tile scraper. There are times when linoleum has been laminated over a previous wood or tile flooring and the glue that was used will require all the layers of flooring to come up. This can be an extremely time consuming task. I’ve taken up flooring that took an hour per each five square feet, kitchen floor taking two to three hours, and sometimes more. It usually happens in homes which are over forty years old.
Bathroom floor tile is usually easier and the shower tile generally pops right off. The hard ones are the slate floor tile, they require a lot more work to remove because the material breaks off in pieces and layers and is hard to get under with the chisel. Often a sledge hammer is necessarily to break the slate tile into sections. It’s just a lot of work from different angels with more than one tool. Sometimes the slate floor tile wont come up leaving the surface beneath smooth enough to lay new tile or flooring, and must be left in place. in these cases the new flooring will be laid over it, but that only works if it is some kind of heavy tile that can be floated with something that will take up the irregularities in the surface of the existing tile.