Essential Points to Remember when Fitting a Carpet
It is fortunate that quality carpet is so simple to come by in this day and age. Drop in to your local carpet retailer and order the style of your choice and wait for the carpet to be delivered. Now, you can ask for the carpet to be trimmed and installed or you can decide to fit the carpet yourself. It’s uncomplicated for stairs and straight hallways but much trickier for those awkwardly shaped rooms. Yet with the right tools and know-how, you’ll have a great looking room at the end of your hard toil.
Preparing the floor
Check that your flooring underneath where the carpet is going is clean and free of any debris and nails. The best results for carpet has always been with clean and flat surfaces. Secure your carpet gripper around the edging of the whole room. Leave a gap at least one and half times the thickness of your selected carpet. The gripper will come with an angled edge on one side which needs to go nearest to the wall.
How to Add Underlay
Under laying is really useful for fitting carpets for several reasons. The first is that it cushions the carpet and the second is that it acts like sound proofing lessening impact noises from people walking across it. To lay down underlay you must make sure that it overlaps on top of your grippers you installed. You should lay it in strips and staple along the inside of the carpet grippers. Once that is done, trim all excess.
Now the carpet…
Commence with a piece of carpet that overlaps the edge of the floor by about five inches. You can always cut off this excess later. To cut your initial section, utilise the longest part of the floor and then add the additional five inches to the measurement. Fold back the carpet piece over on itself and cut through the piece with a knife tool. If your room is big enough for two pieces then repeat the step again with a second piece. Where the two pieces touch, slightly overlap the two edges and cut off the excess again. Use some seaming tape to attach the two edges together. Use a seaming iron to make the adhesive stick the pieces to one another. The simple part of the job now involves using a carpet stretcher to tug the edge of the carpet across the grippers we fixed at the beginning. Push the carpet over using the stretcher and the tacks will fasten firmly on to the underneath of the carpet. Cut off any excess and what you should be left with is a wonderful looking carpet floor for you to admire for years to come.
