You’ve scored along the painted edges, gently worked a the trim off with some kind of prying tool, and now you need to deal with the nails still in the trim. This is a simple little how-to on pulling nails out of the trim you’ve removed without damaging the surface of the trim.

This is SUCH a simple, quick how-to I’m going with mostly photos and captions.

Your nice, undamaged trim piece.

Oh SNAP! All those nails are still in the trim.

OK, it’s decision time. What t-shirt am I gonna wear? That, and what do you do next? You whack this thing with a hammer and make it pop out through the front so your hammer or nail puller has the head to grab onto, right?

WRONG!

You pull it out from the back.

Grab it real low with some powerful pliers.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: I normally use my old stand-by, my CHANNELLOCK Straight-Jaw Tongue & Groove Pliers but I didn’t have them at this job site so I had to use these weird knock-offs with the grips that weren’t adhering to the handles anymore and they were turning and slipping and almost coming off. If I had time I would’ve reshot these with my real CHANNELLOCKS but whatcha gonna do?)

Gently start to roll onto the curved part of the pliers and let the rolling action do the work.

Aww yeah. And plink, it’s out. Time and pressure, time and pressure. Actually, this takes about 2 seconds.

And this is the front side again after the nail removal. Nice.

And that’s it. A simple process that you just need to repeat a million times if you have a ton of trim, or a ton of oak floorboards with the nails still in them that you and your lady friend found on the side of the road and decided to bring home and now they’re in the basement waiting to be stepped on some night because you’re rushing down to the basement because you think you hear water running and you forgot the boards are (for some reason) at the bottom of the stairs.