Hey friends,

🧶 Laying Carpet

Pros for carpet:

• It's cosy. How many days in the UK are a higher temp than we'd heat our homes to where it would be nicer to have something cooler underfoot? I couldn't find the answer but even here in the south-east it's probably in the low 10s. 95% of the time, cosy is a good thing. Unless you have UFH upstairs, that's a winner.
• It's quiet. No loud footsteps heard in the floor below or waking up your family in the middle of the night.
• As discussed last week, carpet makes it easy to access the underside of your floorboards.

Cons:

• More difficult to clean and it wears out quicker than solid flooring but since most of us take our shoes off before going upstairs that's not a big issue.
• You really need to clear the room of furniture to lay it properly. With hard flooring you can probably do half, shift the furniture on to the newly laid floor then lay the rest.
• Maybe it doesn't look quite as good as hard flooring. A rug on top of hard flooring gets you some of the cosy and quiet benefits of carpet but can also be removed for a thorough clean.

If you compare with laminate it's about the same cost. The choice is yours, but I like it.

Grippers

The first step is easy peasy. Lay your wooden grippers with the teeth pointing towards the wall. A small gap is required between the skirting and gripper of 5-10mm. This gap will be where the edge of the carpet tucks into and a rule of thumb is half the thickness of the carpet. The one I'm using is 12mm so I used 6mm packers to get the gap right.

Then hammer your nails into the floorboards. If you're doing this on a concrete subfloor the nails should still go in but if not maybe remove them and use some glue instead.

Underlay

As much as I'm in favour of carpet upstairs, I'm against it downstairs. But if you are laying it downstairs on a suspended floor and you haven't got floor insulation and the associated vapour barrier then you'll want to put down a breathable floor lining paper over your floorboards under the underlay. Maybe this is what Speedy Gonzales was always on about (sorry. I'm learning the ways of the dad-joke). This stops draughts and dirt depositing on the underside of the underlay. You'll thank yourself when you eventually pull it up.

The underlay I chose is this one. I used it in the other bedroom and at 11mm thick, it's really soft underfoot. Again, if you're downstairs then pay attention to the 'tog' rating (like R-value - higher is better). In this room I'm interested in sound proofing and this underlay is as good as it gets (43 dB impact reduction) without transitioning to proper acoustic underlay. This mass loaded vinyl example states a 56dB impact reduction but likely isn't as soft underfoot.

I laid it in the opposite direction of the floorboards so no edge of the underlay lines up with an edge of a floorboard. Nice and smooth.

To keep it in position you need a few floor staples. It's difficult to apply enough pressure with a staple gun to get the staple to sink into the floorboards so use a hammer tacker instead. If the staple doesn't go all the way in, use a hammer.

To avoid the staple going all the way through the underlay, tack it across one of the threads.

We recently held our boy's 2nd birthday party at the house. The downstairs was filled with screaming toddlers so to escape the carnage I took it upon myself to give tours of my DIY to the interested - and probably not so interested - dads. One, who has used a similar underlay on concrete decided to turn it upside down and fixed it spray adhesive, reckoning it would adhere better to the non-foam side. Said it's fine. So that's an option and it probably doesn't matter much which way up the underlay goes.

The last step is to tape the joins to ensure it stays flat. I think cloth tape is the best but I used up whatever tape I had in the garage.

If I were doing this again I would probably have had the join with the black tape on the other side of the room i.e. I would have started with a full roll on the right hand side because that's where it gets walked on most. it's a minor thing, I can't feel it underfoot, but it would have been sensible.

Carpet

Here's an amazing fact: this carpet is the exact same price, £14.99 per m2, as when I bought the same a year and half ago. Unheard of! Quality seems the same too.

It's 100% polypropylene which I prefer as it's easier to clean thoroughly and won't get eaten by moths. Really comfortable underfoot and far cheaper than its equivalents at, say, CarpetRight. Together with the grippers and underlay - £303. Decent.

Generally speaking, the pile direction should run towards the door and away from windows as this looks better when light is reflected from it.

The pile runs in the direction of the length of the carpet i.e. in the direction it comes off the manufacturing machine. The width is set to usually 4 or 5m.

So that's the first decision to make before ordering. Measure the longest wall (yellow arrow) which is at right angles to the pile, in my case the radiator wall with the alcove: ~3.6m. Add 20cm overlap (10cm for each side) and that brings me to 3.8m. Therefore a 4m width carpet is sufficient.

Then measure in the other direction, and remember to include the door threshold, then add 20cm.

When you get the carpet you'll know which way it has to be turned. In the pic below I have to turn this rolled up carpet 90 degrees so the pile is running either from window to door or door to window.

To work out which way, you can look at the carpet and brush it with your hand to see which way the pile runs but here's a pretty neat trick: Get a small piece of paper and a pencil. With your palm roll the pencil back and forth over the paper and the paper will move in the direction of the pile. It doesn't matter which orientation the paper or pencil is in, the paper always moves in the same direction.

In the pic below the paper moves towards the door, which was my intention.

Now we know which way the carpet is to be opened, the next stage is getting it in the right position and cutting off the excess with a utility knife (use a new blade for this project), leaving a bit of overlap all round (10cm or so). It's quite hard work and you have to get yourself under the carpet to move it around. Then you'll probably have folds which I like to work out with the carpet stretcher.

It's very difficult not to scuff your walls a bit while doing this. It's inevitable so that's another reason to keep some spare paint.

Once you're happy with its position start at the corner of the longest wall or the opposite corner to the door. They're one and the same in my instance.

For about 80cm-1m each side of the corner, hook the carpet onto the grippers* by stretching the carpet a bit, pushing down on the carpet over the grippers and letting the grippers teeth sink into the underside of the carpet. Then cut the excess carpet off. You can do this by pressing the carpet into the gap between skirting and gripper and scoring along with the knife. This works best for me. The other way is bending the carpet back on itself and cutting it close to the skirting.

Then use the carpet tucker (or similar tool - bolster chisel or taping knife might do) to push the edge of the carpet into that gap between gripper and skirting. If you find you've cut the carpet too short you can use the knee kicker to stretch it. Another, less professional, option is to pull some fibres from an offcut and stuff them down the gap. They'll be wedged in tight so won't get sucked up by a vacuum.

I used some weights to hold the carpet down and then I stretched the carpet to the other corner along the longest wall (the corner in the alcove) and did the same. Then I worked along this radiator wall cutting and tucking the carpet.

After that, I tackled the 3rd corner, stretching the carpet along from the first corner and opposite corner (the alcove) and then did the wall between first and third corner.

Then I stretched the carpet towards the door and did the final two walls. Confused? Here you go:

The stretching is the tricky part. You often have to start at the far side and keep kicking the folds out to the opposite corner/wall. Using a few heavy objects helps with not pulling up the edges you've already done.

The result should be a nice flat carpet.

Here's what the tucked edges of the carpet look like.

*The issue I had is that because my underlay is so thick (11mm), the grippers which are only 5mm are some way below the top of the underlay which makes it difficult to hook the carpet on. I remembered I had the same problem last time. Next time I may raise the grippers with some of the lath I have to get them a bit higher. This is another reason I used the weights - I couldn't rely on the grippers holding the carpet. Once everything is tucked in though, it all looks good and the grippers grip.

Hopefully that's well enough explained. It's a lot of work and you may want to buy some knee pads for it but the result is as good as any professional carpet fitter achieve.

At the door I've not put in a threshold bar yet, just overlapped the landing carpet over my new one. I'll leave it like that until I do the landing.

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I completed this on 29th December and we said 'Right! Get the boy in. He can have a door and the rest later!'. You see, we'd given up our room to the boy since the start of the bathroom project and had been sleeping downstairs. So it felt like having two rooms done at once. Good to have my projector back!

Next week is the finale of this room's renovation and there's a couple of good mini-projects in there to tell you about too.

👋

I've been incredibly clever. When food was reasonably priced I stocked up on fat reserves to live off during this period of high food inflation.

No, not really. For the turn of the year I decided to go on a health kick implement lifestyle change:

A good start, though I'm sure it'll become more difficult from here on.

I don't think I updated you on my last new year's resolution which was the far more simple task of learning to juggle. Well, it only took around 2 weeks of 15 minutes of practice a day and now I can juggle three balls reasonably well. It entertains the boy for about 5 minutes before I need to find a new game. Still, it's a cool party trick.

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