Instead of Blogging

Since I wrote my “Hurrying Up” post, I began prepping flooring non-stop. It is amazing how long it takes to get everything ready for carpet installation. Because nobody would tell us exactly what they wanted us to do to get the floor prepped (I suppose that they wanted to do the prep, but we expected the damage under the carpet would be huge and didn’t want to pay for a project of that magnitude done by a professional carpenter). The Bearded One went to a DIY website and downloaded instructions.

We needed to pull all staples and scrape up all glue. And then make sure that there were no gaps in the subfloor to cause excessive wear in scattered places in the new carpet. I understand that you are supposed to glue the carpet pad, and then staple only on stair treads but our carpet was BOTH glued and stapled and stapled and stapled and stapled some more. Everywhere but on the concrete slab in the family room. And that slab? It had animal paw prints in the concrete…ah well it must be those pesky beer bottles again.

I filled all of the gaps between the sub floor boards and then I painted on several coats of Kilz and then realized that I hadn’t removed the baseboards. After they were off there was drywall to repair…dang. I cannot recommend a Dremel Multi-Max highly enough. After the Kilz , more staples showed up on the clean white paint. In fact, I was still pulling staples the morning of the scheduled installation. Which was still incomplete 2 weeks later because the Mill shipped the wrong carpet.

Which brings me to a recommendation that I cannot stress too strongly: When you are purchasing carpet don’t just take a little sample. We bought a 1 foot wide 12 foot long sample and it has saved us a tremendous amount of heartache and expense. The carpet that was sent was very close in color to what we had ordered, but the quality was not right and if we hadn’t had that large sample so that it was evident to everyone, we might have had 5 -7 year carpet rather than 15 year carpet…..

The above was written on Thursday, September 2nd. It is now November 3rd. In the meantime, the Carpet Mill sent replacement carpet and SURPRISE! It was the same as the first carpet that they sent…obviously they have changed the spec for the carpet and it is not at all what we would want in our home. Home Depot has been wonderful in backing us up. When seeing the sample that we originally ordered and what we received from the Mill they went to the manufacturer to complain for us. Then they arranged for us to choose completely different carpet from a different manufacturer. We waited for two more samples and had to reorder carpet and wait for installation. At least the measurements are already taken! We still had our home entertainment center torn apart, all excess furniture was stored in the guest room (which you can’t walk across). The correct carpet finally arrived and was installed on October 29th and we are now in the process of putting the house back together. I can’t believe that this has taken so long!