Replace Carpet with Hardwood in Ann Arbor

This is the good outcome, and in older Ann Arbor houses it's a real possibility. Plenty of oak floors went under carpet in the 1970s, and our view is that the carpet usually saved the middle of the room from wear. Along each wall there's a row of tack strip nailed through the oak, and across the field the pad was stapled down.

How those come out matters. This Old House suggests a painter's 5-in-1 tool or a small flat screwdriver for pad staples when you want to keep the wood underneath, and a careful crew pries tack strip up without gouging the boards. The tack strip nail holes along the walls stay behind. Ask whether filling them is included when the floor is refinished. Carpet also hides pet accidents, and dark urine stains in oak are a hardwood floor repair job before the sanding starts.

Under newer carpet you'll usually find plywood or OSB, and new 3/4 inch solid hardwood can be nailed straight to it once it's clean. Clean means scraped. One installer writing in Wood Floor Business runs a scraper over every inch: tack strip nails get set below the surface or pulled with side cutters, pad staples get scraped up or pulled, and any framing nail sticking up gets driven down. A nail head left proud makes the boards above it ride up, and that high spot shows after sanding.

Watch for particleboard. Carpet installers often laid it as underlayment, and the NWFA says particleboard is not an acceptable base for nailing down any wood floor, because it won't hold fasteners. The fix is to tear it out or overlay it with subfloor panels at least 19/32 inch thick. Subfloor thickness and flatness are covered on our subfloor repair page. Moisture readings on the subfloor and the new boards come before any nailing (see hardwood floor installation).

On a slab, the pad is usually glued, and chunks of it stay stuck after the carpet comes up. They have to be scraped off before anything new goes down.

Over a slab, the usual choice is engineered hardwood, glued down or floated on underlayment, because it moves less than solid wood when moisture changes. Solid boards on concrete need extra steps, such as a moisture-control system under a glue-down plank, so expect them to cost more. Before either, ask for a moisture test of the slab itself. The test methods and vapor retarders are on our engineered hardwood installation page. Old black adhesive under carpet or tile in an older building can contain asbestos, so don't sand or grind it (see parquet flooring).

Hardwood sits differently from carpet, and the doorways show it first. The NWFA's nail-down steps include undercutting door casings and jambs, so the boards slide under the trim instead of being scribed around it. A neat way to do it is to lay a flooring scrap upside down on the subfloor as a guide and cut the jamb with an oscillating saw resting on top. Doors that swung over carpet may need trimming too, and that's worth asking about at the estimate.

Where the new floor meets a thinner one, a reducer or threshold closes the gap. The NWFA lists both at 5/16 to 3/4 inch thick. Between two floors of the same height, a T-molding is used, and it's fastened to the subfloor, never to the wood. At the top or bottom of a staircase, a new floor changes the height of the first or last riser. Michigan's code limits how much risers can differ, and our hardwood stairs page explains the rule and what to do when the carpet comes off the steps as well.