I’m Mario Vilchis, and I run the crew at Vilchis Hardwood Floors. A lot of the calls we get from Cary start with the same question, usually before anyone has picked a floor or asked about price: is there hardwood under this carpet?
When the answer is yes, it’s the best news of the whole project. You get a real oak floor back for the cost of a refinish instead of a new install. When the answer is plywood, it’s better to find out before you spend a Saturday ripping carpet out. Either way, you can usually tell in about ten minutes without damaging anything, and the age of your house tells you a lot before you lift a single corner.
Start With The Year Your House Was Built
The year your house went up predicts what’s under the carpet better than any trick. In Cary it breaks down roughly like this:
| When the house was built | What’s usually under the carpet | Odds of hardwood |
|---|---|---|
| Older homes, mostly around downtown Cary | Oak that a later owner carpeted over | Good |
| 1980s and 1990s | Oak in some rooms, plywood in others | Could go either way |
| 2000s and newer | Plywood or OSB subfloor, especially upstairs | Low |
| Any room on a concrete slab | Concrete | None |
If your house is one of the older ones around downtown Cary, your odds are good. Before wall-to-wall carpet became standard in new houses, hardwood was the normal floor in living rooms, halls, and bedrooms. Plenty of those floors got carpeted later by an owner who wanted something softer or more current.
A big share of Cary was built in the 1980s and 1990s, in neighborhoods like Preston and Lochmere. Many of those houses already show narrow red oak in the foyer, kitchen, or dining room, so the carpeted rooms are the real question. Builders back then often laid carpet straight onto the plywood subfloor in family rooms and bedrooms, because the plan always called for carpet there. In other houses the oak runs wall to wall and somebody covered part of it later. This is the group where checking pays off, because it really can go either way.
In Amberly, Cary Park, and the newer streets in West Cary off Green Level, the usual setup is wood on the main floor and carpet everywhere else. Under that upstairs carpet there’s almost always OSB or plywood and nothing else. It’s still worth a look, but I wouldn’t build a budget around a surprise.
If a carpeted room sits on a concrete slab, the carpet and pad are sitting on the concrete. There’s no hidden wood floor to find there.
Four Ways To Check Without Wrecking The Carpet
1. Pull A Floor Vent Cover
This is the fastest check and the one I’d try first. If the carpeted room has a floor register, lift the cover out. Most just sit in the opening, and a few have a screw or two. Shine a flashlight on the cut edge of the opening and you’ll see the floor in cross-section. If a metal duct boot lines the hole, look down along the side of it.
- A solid layer of wood about three-quarters of an inch thick, sitting between the carpet pad and the subfloor, is very likely hardwood. Sometimes you can even see the tongue-and-groove joint where two boards meet.
- Thin layers glued together, showing as stripes along the edge, are plywood. A layer of pressed wood chips is OSB. If either one sits directly under the pad, there’s no hardwood in that spot.
- A crumbly layer that looks like compressed sawdust is particleboard underlayment. It shows up under carpet and vinyl in older houses, and there’s more on it below.
Some older houses have thinner strip flooring, around 5/16 of an inch. It can still be refinished, but there’s less wood to work with, so mention it when you call.
2. Lift A Corner In A Closet
A closet is the best spot, because if the carpet doesn’t lie perfectly flat afterward, nobody will see it. Wear work gloves, since tack strip is a row of small, sharp nails pointing up. Grip the carpet right in the corner with pliers and pull up and toward you until it pops off the strip. Fold the pad back and look.
When you’re done, lay the pad back down and press the carpet onto the tack strip with the heel of your hand, working out from the corner.
One catch: closets don’t always match the room. In some houses the hardwood runs into the closets, and in others the closets were left as bare subfloor. If you see plywood in the closet, check a second spot in the room itself, like a corner behind a sofa or a bed.
3. Look Up From The Crawlspace
Plenty of Cary houses sit over a crawlspace. If you’re comfortable going down there, or you already have a pest or HVAC tech coming out, look at the underside of the floor below the carpeted room.
Hardwood is nailed down through the subfloor, and the nail tips often poke out the bottom in tight, regular rows. Look in the open spaces between the floor joists. The subfloor’s own nails go into the joists, so a pattern of nail tips between them most likely came from a wood floor above. A clean underside doesn’t rule hardwood out, though. A thick subfloor can hide the nails completely.
4. Ask A Neighbor With The Same Floor Plan
A lot of Cary subdivisions went up with one or two builders working from a short list of plans. If a neighbor with your plan has already pulled their carpet, they know what’s under yours. A quick post in your neighborhood Facebook group or on Nextdoor will often turn up someone who has done it. That won’t replace looking at your own floor, but it tells you what to expect.
What Usually Turns Up Under The Carpet
Red Oak Strip
When there is hardwood under carpet in a Cary house, it’s usually narrow red oak strip, about 2¼ inches wide, sanded and finished on site. It’s the same floor a lot of 1980s and 1990s houses here have in the foyer and dining room. Because the carpet kept sun and shoes off it, it often has more life left than the exposed oak elsewhere in the house.
Plywood Or OSB
This is the subfloor with nothing on top of it but the carpet pad. It isn’t bad news. It just means you’re picking a new floor instead of refinishing an old one. A sound plywood or OSB subfloor can take new solid or engineered hardwood, laminate, or vinyl plank.
Particleboard Underlayment
Some older houses have a layer of particleboard over the subfloor, put there to give carpet or vinyl a smooth base. It does that job fine. It doesn’t hold flooring nails well, though, and it swells if it ever gets wet, so it normally comes up before new hardwood goes down.
Old Vinyl Or Tile
Carpet sometimes went right over an older kitchen, laundry, or bathroom floor. In an older house, don’t scrape, sand, or pry at old vinyl, floor tiles, or the black adhesive under them until a sample has been tested. Some flooring from past decades contains asbestos, and the EPA’s guidance on asbestos in the home is plain about it: don’t sand or scrape suspect flooring, and have it checked before a remodel disturbs it.
Wood That Stops Partway
Sometimes the oak runs most of the room and then quits at an old wall line, a closed-up doorway, or the spot where an addition starts. That’s fixable. We weave new boards into the old ones and color-match the stain so the repair blends in. We covered how that works in our post on matching new hardwood to old floors.
What The Carpet Was Hiding, And What Sanding Fixes
Wood that has spent 20 or 30 years under carpet almost always has some marks on it. Most of them look worse than they are.
- A ring of small nail holes about an inch from the walls, left by the tack strip. They’re cosmetic. We fill them during the refinish, and they’re hard to pick out on the finished floor.
- Staples from the carpet pad, sometimes hundreds in one room. Every one has to come out before sanding, because a staple will tear the sandpaper and can gouge the wood.
- Old foam or rubber pad that broke down and stuck to the finish. It looks terrible and comes off with the old finish when we sand.
- Dark gray or black spots, which are usually pet urine that soaked into the wood. Light stains sometimes sand out. Dark ones tend to go deep into the board, so we cut those boards out and weave in new ones before refinishing.
- Stains or cupped boards near a sliding door, an exterior door, or under a window. That usually means water got in at some point. Mild cupping sometimes settles back once the moisture source is fixed and the wood dries, and then it can be sanded level. Boards that feel soft get replaced.
- A color difference. Wood that’s been covered for years usually looks lighter than oak that’s been out in the light. Sanding down to bare wood takes care of most of that.
The two things on that list that actually change the price are pet stains and water damage, because both mean replacing boards. If you want a sense of where your floor lands, I wrote about how we decide whether to refinish or replace a hardwood floor.
Should You Pull The Carpet Up Yourself?
You can. It isn’t complicated, just dusty, and the tack strip is sharp. A few things will keep you from making extra work:
- Leave the carpet down until the work is on the calendar. It’s protecting the wood, and a bare floor picks up scratches fast, especially with kids and dogs in the house.
- If you cut the carpet into strips to carry it out, lift each section and cut from the back. A utility knife pulled across the top of the carpet will score the wood underneath.
- Go easy on the tack strip. To pull it, slide a flat bar under the strip right next to each nail and lift, with a scrap of wood under the bar so you aren’t prying against the floor. If that sounds like a lot, leave the strip for us.
- Don’t scrape adhesive or anything that looks like old vinyl. See the asbestos note above.
- Don’t rent a drum sander. If it stops moving for even a second, it digs a dip into the floor, and taking that dip back out costs wood you can’t get back.
Or skip all of it. We can pull the carpet, pad, tack strip, and staples as part of the job, and it’s listed on your written quote.
Refinish It, Or Put Something New Down?
If what you found is solid hardwood with enough wood left above the tongue, refinishing is almost always the better deal. A normal-sized house takes three to four days, mostly because each coat has to dry before the next one goes on. Our sanding is dust-contained, so most people stay in the house during the job. We walk through those days in what to expect when your floors get refinished.
Red oak has a pink undertone that surprises people once the old finish is gone. If you’re after the pale, natural look of a newer house, we test stains on your actual floor before you commit. Color on a phone screen and color on your oak at four in the afternoon are two different things.
If you found plywood, or the oak only covers part of the space, there are two routes. We can add new red oak and weave it into what’s there so the whole level matches. Or, if the room is a playroom or a mudroom where water and dog claws are a daily thing, luxury vinyl plank may be the smarter floor.
Want Us To Take A Look?
If you’d rather not crawl around with a flashlight, we’ll do it for you. Our shop is at 237 Obie Dr in Durham, a short run down I-40, and most Cary neighborhoods are 20 to 25 minutes away, whether that’s Preston, Lochmere, Carpenter Village, or the newer streets out by Amberly. We work across the 27511, 27513, 27518, and 27519 ZIP codes.
On a free in-home estimate we’ll check a vent or a closet corner, look at how much wood is left, take moisture readings on the floor and subfloor, and email you a written, fixed quote, usually within a day or two. You can see everything else we install in town, including LVP, tile, and epoxy, on our Cary flooring company page.
Vilchis Hardwood Floors
237 Obie Dr, Durham, NC 27713
(919) 794-1116
[email protected]
Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Serving Cary, Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, Apex, Morrisville, Garner, and Wake Forest.
Request a free in-home estimate
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Hardwood Under Carpet Usually In Good Shape?
Usually, yes. Carpet keeps sunlight and foot traffic off the wood, so floors that have been covered for decades often have more life left than the exposed floors in the same house. Tack strip holes, staples, and stuck pad are cosmetic. Pet stains and water damage are the problems that add cost.
How Can I Tell If It’s Solid Hardwood Or Engineered?
Look at the edge of the floor at a vent opening. Solid hardwood is one piece of wood from top to bottom. Engineered hardwood has a thin layer of real wood glued on top of plywood layers. Hardwood under carpet in a Cary house from the 1990s or earlier is very likely solid.
Can You Refinish Just The Rooms That Were Under Carpet?
Yes. If those rooms connect to a hall or room where the oak was already showing, though, it’s usually better to refinish the connected areas at the same time. Otherwise you can end up with a visible line where the new finish meets the old one.
Do You Take Up The Carpet, Or Do I Need To?
We can do it. Pulling the carpet, pad, tack strip, and staples can be part of the job, and it shows up as its own line on your written quote. Call (919) 794-1116 to set up a free estimate.
