What to expect from your carpet installation

This past weekend, my fiance´ and I traveled 6 hours to install carpet in my aunt’s home (does it surprise you that I’m engaged to a carpet installer?  I told you lived and breathed this stuff.)  Anyway, while we were sitting in the car for 6 hours on the way up to Queensbury, NY, I figured while we were going through all this trouble to help out a much beloved family member, I might as well make the best use of my time and document the installation for you.  I’ve tried to give you a broad overview of the process, and try to answer some of the frequently asked questions we typically hear in the process; this is in no means a how-to article, just an article to give you an idea of what to expect.

A few things to keep in mind when having your carpet replaced; even if you are paying your installer to move your furniture around while installing the carpeting, you will still need to move your small items, breakables, lamps, electronics, etc.

Would you trust a stranger to move your family heirlooms around?

If you are ripping up all the old carpeting and pad yourself, as apposed to paying the installer to do it, you’ll want to make sure you have all the little pieces of padding removed from under the staples, and the staples either smoothed out (by banging them in with a hammer) or pulling them out of the floor. Leave the tackstrips down, if any are damaged, your installer will replace them for you.

See? Nice and clean!

When your installer arrives, he will probably re-measure the space, just to double check that the measurements are correct and the carpet diagam is laid out correctly.

Your installer should also go over seam placement with you, just so there are no surprises when he’s finished.

The next step is to lay in and staple down the padding, there is a skim-coat on all padding types, this should be installed face up.

After the padding is all laid in, the carpet needs to be brought into the room.

Fuzzy side up!

After the carpet is in the room, your installer will kick the carpet around to square it up into one corner of the room.

At some point during the installation, your installer may have to remove the doors in order to facilitate the carpet installation.  If, for some reason, he cannot put the doors back on (typically because the new carpet is much thicker than the old) you, as a home-owner, are responsible for trimming the doors and putting them back on.  Most carpet installers don’t necessarily carry carpentry tools with them and will be unable to trim the doors.

The next step is to trim the carpeting down so it fits more comfortably in the room and doesn’t ride up the walls while being kicked and stretched over the tackstrips.

After all that’s done, the next step is to kick in the carpet; hard (I’m told there’s a bit more finesse to it than just kicking hard, but that’s pretty much what I saw.)

That’s a carpet kicker, a nasty looking tool, but it gets the job done!

Then the carpet needs to be trimmed one final time and then tucked underneath the trim.  The picture below shows a trimmer tool, some installers use this tool to lessen the damage to your trim; not everyone uses this tool, some installers will trim this with a knife.

And now we’re all done!  Easy, right?  Your house will smell like new carpeting for a few days, but the more you vacuum and air out the space, the faster this smell will dissipate.  And of course, the smell isn’t harmful in any way.

One more thing I forgot to mention at the beginning; you’ll need electricity for the installers to use their tools, and the area that they are working in needs to be at least 70 degrees.  This warmer temperature warms the carpet and helps it stretch better into the room.  If the area isn’t warm when the carpeting is put in, chances are that when it does warm up, the carpet will buckle; so turn up that thermostat!

So that’s a very basic overview of a very simple carpet installation; we can get into seams and steps at a later date.

Did I overlook any questions you might still have?