Taking up carpet

On Wednesday, Carl attacked the job of taking up the indoor/outdoor carpet on the patio of our lot...

We forgot to take a "before" picture - but you may be able to see the green carpet on the patio in this picture from a couple of week ago. It doesn't look *too* bad from a distance, but it was really in bad shape with rips and holes and generally looking pretty disreputable! Carl said that, when he and Sue purchased the lot in the spring of 2019, it was in bad shape, and 5 summers of beating sun had done nothing to improve the carpet.

Carl started with the section in front of the shed (the white building behind is the back of our neighbor's property on the next street over). We had figured that if the carpet did not come up well, it would be better to have it partially scraped up in the back of the lot rather than the front. It came up pretty well -- just a bit of glue left on the concrete.

In process on the front part -- there was one stubborn part which had come up a couple of years ago (while the lot was rented out and we were not here) -- one of our neighbors had offered to tape it down, and the tape he used was VERY good tape!

Bundles of ugly green carpeting to go to the dumpster.

Just a little more to go.

I had been away while Carl was doing all this work -- when I got home, he was sweeping up.

Carl used his battery-powered multi-tool with a rigid blade attachment to convince the recalcitrant carpet tape to come up.

While he was working with the multi-tool, I used the flat-bladed shovel to try to get some more of the carpet glue scraped up and continued sweeping up the remnants. He was able to get all the green carpet up and a lot of the carpet tape. We put a plastic tarp in the back of the Jeep and loaded the rolled up waste carpet into the back of the Jeep to carry it to the dumpster. We decided to stop with the on-going scraping of the carpet glue in preference to getting the carpet deposited in the dumpster before sundown.

The dumpster area is also known as "The VO (Venture Out) Market" - a place where people can take items which they no longer want or need so that others can pick up if they have need or want them! A guy was there leaving a set of shelves (that we examined with a thought of whether we may be able to use). We decided that no one would want to have our rotted green carpet so just tossed it into the dumpster.

Now to finish getting the carpet glue up and to decide what to put down instead!