Removing Glued Carpet From Wood Floor

Using a plastic putty knife carefully pry away the carpet glue from your floor being especially careful only to attack the glue itself and not the underlying floor.

Removing glued carpet from wood floor. Wear a respirator gloves goggles and protective clothing if you choose this option. See my full disclosure here. It does not come up easily. On a basic level concrete is sturdier and thicker in density.

First we used a utility knife to cut the carpet into strips and peeled each strip of carpet up. If you start sanding and the glue is not separating from the wood but is actually being pressed into the grain of the wood floor stop sanding. Manually removing carpet glue has several benefits but the primary one is that it protects your floors from the type of discoloration that can happen with the use of chemicals. My preferred method of removing old carpet glue is to use a chemical adhesive remover such as sentinel 747 which is a quality product that is easy to use.

This post contains affiliate links. Some adhesives are water soluble drenching the floor with water often makes them easy to scrape off with a floor scraper chemical paint strippers also do the job. In others it is much more difficult. It turns out it is very difficult to remove glued down carpet.

A third alternative is to scrape off the adhesive. Once the carpet has been removed you ll still have to remove the adhesive from the subfloor. In some ways the process of removing carpet glue from concrete floors is easier than removing it from wood ones.