Pulling the carpet in a 1960 Carrollwood house: what you will find, room by room, and what it costs

October 8, 2026

Carrollwood was founded in 1959. Matt Jetton’s company bought 310 acres of Ingram Fruit Company orange groves on the west side of Lake Carroll and laid out curving streets, and the National Association of Home Builders named it U.S. Subdivision of the Year in 1961. More than 900 houses went up around the lake by 1970. That timing put a lot of them in the last good decade for cement terrazzo in Florida.

In our pull of Hillsborough County property records, 18 of 55 houses in Carrollwood Subdivision Units 1 and 2, built 1959 to 1969, still list terrazzo as their flooring. Most of the rest list tile, carpet or wood. If you own one of those houses and the floor is covered, here is what you are likely to find, room by room, and what each room typically costs to bring back at our published prices.

The same walk-through applies to a 1960 house in Town ‘n’ Country, Temple Terrace or Forest Hills; only the history differs.

Before you start

Pull up the house on the property appraiser’s site. If it says Concrete Block and a year between the mid-1950s and 1970, you are in the window. Then go to a bedroom closet, grab the carpet at a corner with pliers, lift it straight up off the tack strip and fold it back. You are looking for a speckled surface of stone chips in a cement background and a thin metal line running through it. If you see it, the rest of this post applies. Our property-record guide walks through the record in detail.

The living room

What you will probably find: carpet and pad over the whole room, tack strip around every wall, and a gray or tan film of pad adhesive. Under the strip, a line of nail holes with orange rust dots. If the room ever had a heavy piece of furniture with metal feet on wet carpet, there may be a larger rust mark.

What it needs: carpet and glue removal, the holes filled in one pass, and the normal grind, hone and polish. The rust dots usually come off in the grind. See tack-strip holes and rust.

Typical cost for a 15 by 20 foot room (300 sq ft):

The bedrooms

What you will probably find: the same as the living room, sometimes with a second line of nail holes where the room was carpeted twice. Bedrooms with pets can have urine stains in corners and beside doors.

What it needs: the same as the living room, plus stain work where pet stains survive the grind. Old, repeated stains may lighten and stay as a shadow. The NTMA restoration specification says all staining in existing terrazzo may not be possible to remove. See pet urine stains.

Typical cost for a 12 by 12 foot bedroom (144 sq ft): about $1,010 to $1,730 for removal plus grind and polish, plus $150 to $600 for each stain that needs a poultice. Done as part of the whole house, there is no minimum per room; done alone, a single room carries the typical $600 to $1,000 minimum.

The kitchen

What you will probably find: tile. In the Carrollwood subdivisions we pulled, tile was the most common flooring listed on the mid-century houses, 28 of 88, ahead of terrazzo at 21. Kitchens and baths are the likely places for it. Under the tile, if you are lucky, terrazzo with a grid of thinset. If you are less lucky, a layer of old vinyl tile with black adhesive between the ceramic and the terrazzo.

What it needs: careful tile removal, testing any black adhesive for asbestos before anyone grinds it, filling the pits the thinset leaves, then the grind. The EPA lists vinyl floor tiles and their adhesives among products that may contain asbestos. See pits after tile removal and black glue or mastic.

Typical cost for a 150 sq ft kitchen:

The bathrooms

What you will probably find: tile, often over the terrazzo, sometimes over a mortar bed. Around the toilet, a ring of damage from the flange and possibly an old leak.

What it needs: the same tile process as the kitchen, plus a patch at the toilet flange if the plumbing was moved. Tap for hollow spots near the toilet and tub; a long-ago leak can loosen the topping. See hollow-sounding terrazzo.

Typical cost: small rooms tend to sit toward the top of each range because the grinders are big and the corners are tight, but the same lines apply: $4 to $6 per square foot for tile, $5 to $9 for the grind, $75 to $250 per patch.

The wall that is not there anymore

If a previous owner opened the kitchen to the family room, look for a strip of bare slab where the wall stood. The terrazzo was poured around the walls, so there is nothing under them. That strip gets filled with chips matched to the floor and ground in, often with a new divider strip along it to make the line look deliberate. See gap where a wall was removed.

The whole house, added up

For a house with about 1,200 square feet of terrazzo under carpet, average glue and three cracks to fill:

Move 300 of those square feet from carpet to tile and the removal line for that part goes from $600 to $900 up to $1,200 to $1,800. The floor cost estimator will do this arithmetic for your own numbers, and the pricing page explains each line.

Order of work, if you do some of it yourself

1. Pull the carpet and pad; cut it in strips and roll it out.
2. Pry tack strip straight up, close to each nail, so the nails come with it. Leave glued strip.
3. Stop there. Leave the glue, the tile and anything black for us.
4. Tap the floor for hollow spots and mark them with tape.
5. Send photos of each room, a close shot of the worst spot with a coin, and the square footage.

Getting the carpet out yourself saves some of the $2 to $3 per square foot of removal. Getting tile out yourself is where most of the avoidable damage happens, so we would rather do that part.

What you end up with

A floor that looks like a well-kept 1960 terrazzo floor, ground flat and polished to the sheen you pick, with bright strips and crisp chips. The patches will show if you kneel and look for them, and an old pet stain may leave a shadow. For the full process, see terrazzo restoration.