Tools for Installing Carpet and Scraping Flooring

Tools for Installing Carpet and Scraping Flooring

Home improvement expert Danny Lipford demonstrates the tools used to install carpet as well as scrapers used to remove vinyl flooring.

This week, we're looking at a number of solutions to some very common flooring problems and Joe, I'll tell you when your at on a job site and the flooring guys are out there, they have some strange tools.

Joe Truini: Very strange looking tools but if you're going to be putting down your own floor, you're going to need these tools. Fortunately, they're all available at a tool rental dealer.

Danny Lipford: This one, really odd looking. It looks like something from the medieval torch or chamber. It's called a power stretcher.

Joe Truini: Yeah, so you use it in wall-to-wall carpeting to stretch carpet really tight. If you ever noticed carpet had wrinkles in it, it's because someone didn't use this tool properly.

Danny Lipford: They're usually used on larger areas so that you can put one end of it against the baseboard then you can really stretch it out in order to tighten it up.

In smaller areas, you use one of these odd, ball-looking things. You can see the spikes here that hook into the carpet and then you have this pad that you actually kick with your knee and it's called a knee kicker.

Joe Truini: And then for seaming large pieces of carpeting, I have two pieces that come together. There's a heat activated tape and they use an iron to go along the seam and it fuses the tape to the end of the side, so it becomes basically one big piece of carpet.

Danny Lipford: That smell, you can smell all of the job.

Joe Truini: Yeah, nothing smells like that, right? It's not good either.

Danny Lipford: Of course, when you're doing any other type of flooring like tile or vinyl, you normally have to remove some existing flooring. Joe, did you see this thing that I showed a little bit earlier in the show?

Joe Truini: I did, that is great not only for tile or carpeting, it's glued down but you probably get some wood flooring up as well. I like the fact that it's in cordless recip.

Danny Lipford: Yeah, it makes it a lot easier but when the pros are out there, a lot of times, they're dealing with larger areas and they use one of these and it's basically a flooring scraper but you can get some blisters in your hand, wouldn't believe on this thing.

Joe Truini: A really big job, so say I have floor that's fully glued down or a big ceramic tile floor. You might want to consider renting one of these, it's a pro tool; it's an electric scraper. It makes a lot of noise. This is about as lot of tool as you can find but it worked really well. I understand they use to use this on roofs, in fact to pull up roof shingles, imagine that.

Danny Lipford: Yeah, those roofs we get tired of dragging up and down the ladder but it does do a pretty good job for a lot of different floors. I've had to use that a number of times.