How To Remove Carpet From Stairs {And Tools Needed}

How to remove carpet from wood stairs to prep for stain and paint.

If you've ever wanted to remove the old carpet off your stairs, this DIY tutorial is for you!

It's not hard to take off the carpet, but it is time consuming. There are a few tools you'll need during the process.

Years ago I took the carpet off our stairs in an effort to create my dream staircase.

Here are my step by step instructions and the tools I used to do it!

Check underneath first!

If you are planning to refinish the existing steps, the most important step is this first one. That’s checking to see what your stairs look like underneath.

I knew ours had a curved edge to the front, but just to be safe, I pulled up an area on a riser first and pulled just a bit to peek.

The riser is the vertical front of the step, and stair treads are what you step on.

When I knew all was good, I used the large wrench to continue the process:

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You'll just need to grab the carpet in a corner with the wrench or pliers, and pull. (I hear these locking pliers work really well!)

You will think it will be insanely hard to pull the carpet, but it’s so easy, it’s just silly. Pulling up the carpet is hands down the easiest part of this whole process!

If you are just checking the step to see the condition, don’t be afraid to pull a bit of carpet up – you can either just lay it back down and tuck it in when you are done, or staple/hammer it back down.

You won’t need to do much to secure that little bit of carpet if you decide not to move forward with the project.

I used a big wrench with long handles because it was easy to really get a grip on the carpet.

Use a utility knife to cut the carpet up for easy removal.

Remove the padding and tack strips

When you finish the carpet removal, you’ll be left with this:

Grab some work gloves, a face mask (it's GROSS) and safety goggles for the remaining steps.

The carpet padding will be held on by staples but is easily pulled off:

It is about now that you will want to cover your entire house with hard flooring when you see the dust that flies out of the carpet and padding.

Ew.

To get the tack strips off the treads, you’ll need a large pry bar and a hammer.

Stick the bar under the strip, and hammer it in until you get some leverage:

Then rock the bar up and down and pry that baby off. BE CAREFUL.

Some of these came right off, some came off in pieces. There are meeeellions of little tacks coming UP through the strip, and they are lethal little devils.

If you are finishing existing wood steps, be gentle during this process!

Removing the (millions of) staples

I cannot stress enough that this is not a project you want to attempt with small children around -- too many staples, tools and pointy things popping up everywhere.

There will be so. many. staples.

At first I was just grabbing them with the wrench and pulling:

But I soon found just using a flathead screwdriver and the hammer worked much better:

Tap the screwdriver under the staple then pop it off.

You need to watch digging into the wood during this process but I didn’t have that happen much. And when it did, I didn’t mind. I don’t mind if the steps are a bit rugged. :)

Because the staple doesn’t always come all the way out, you will still need to grab them with the wrench or pliers:

They really do come out easily.

These staples do not cooperate as well:

These little buggers were only in the risers and were a HUGE pain in the butt to remove.

You can use either process with these to get them up – if you grab them with the wrench and pull they pop right out. If you can’t get a good hold on them, use the screwdriver and hammer to pop them out a bit.

Good thing is most of these little guys come out with the carpet as you pull it off. For some reason I had many of these to deal with on a few of the risers.

There are certain areas that are just infested with staples.

Like “I am going to cry and never stop if I see one more staple”...so many. There were a ton at the corners of our lower steps:

See? Cry.

Fill holes and sand the stairs

When you are done, the stairs will probably look like this:

I still had some straggly carpet pieces to get off at this point. But I had to have a break from the staples. ;)

With just a quick sanding with my little detail electric sander, it helped clean them up a ton:

Fill any large holes or divots with stainable wood filler using a putty knife. Give everything a good sanding one more time before finishing them up.

Stain and paint the prepped stairs

The last step is to determine the stain you'd like to use, and if you're adding a carpet runner back on, figuring the amount you'll need.

I primed some of the risers just to get and idea of how they would look.

I also played around with some stains and I am THRILLED with the reddish tone on the upper step:

This is where it stalled for a bit. The sander my FIL has does wonders – as you can see on the bottom steps. It is taking the overspray paint right off. But the sander broke yesterday, so we will have to wait.

I am beyond thrilled with the landing though – it was the one area that had me stumped because it was just plywood. My father-in-law recommended installing pine boards so everything would stain the same.

I checked the boards out at Lowe’s and they were all at least a half inch thick…which would create a major trip hazard at the top of the steps going to the landing.

So I walked around for a while trying to figure out what I was going to do. And then it hit me – I saw the beadboard.

I was thinking of just laying the pieces out across the landing, but my FIL is brilliant and he staggered them like hardwood flooring:

The edge where the landing and the stairs meet will be sanded down so there is an easy transition. The flooring is hammered down with finishing nails.

I hope it stains up well, because we are thrilled with how it looks so far!

Each section of the stairs (upper and lower half) took about two hours, start to finish, to complete. That included pulling the carpet, tack strips and staples, as well as a bit of sanding and then clean up.

So, have I convinced you to peek under your carpet yet? ;)

The next step is finishing the stairs -- see this post for how to stain and paint your wood steps.

And the final reveal of the stained and painted wood stairs here!

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