If you’re handy around the house, you may have thought about doing your own carpet installation. And as the leading provider of all kinds of flooring products in Chicago, we have worked with many customers who have the skills, tools, and experience necessary for DIY installations, and it is possible for these projects to yield positive results.
However, we have also worked with many customers who wanted to try a do-it-yourself approach, who ended up wasting a lot of their own time and money before realizing that they needed to hire professionals either to complete an unfinished job, or to fix a poor installation. That’s why we’d like to take this time to explain some of the reasons why self-installing carpet is generally a bad idea.
Carpet installation may seem like a relatively simple job, because unlike tile or hardwood jobs, a carpet installation doesn’t require dealing with lots of small, intricately-laid-out pieces. But in many ways, installing carpet is actually even trickier than other flooring jobs, and should be left to professionals if you want to protect your investment.
The simple fact that carpet is sold by the roll starts to present challenges right away. Making sure you have ordered the right size roll of carpet may sometimes seem easier than it really is.
Getting a roll of carpet that seems to be the right size can be harder than it seems unless your room is square or rectangular. You need to think about the shape of the room, corners, closets, and small areas that may also need to be finished that sometimes get overlooked.
The first time you try loading a massive roll of carpet into the backseat of a car, you’ll begin to understand that a tidy carton of tile actually seems much more manageable in comparison.
Once you get the carpet inside, you’ll have to try to handle, measure, and cut those unwieldy rolls into the exact shapes and sizes that your room requires. Chances are, you’ll need to lay multiple pieces, which will need to abut each other extremely closely, and then you’ll have to disguise the seams.
This process requires a great deal of specialized tools, some of which you’ll need to buy, some of which you’ll need to rent. If you’re not the kind of person who has a power stretcher, an industrial seam roller, and a seaming iron lying around the garage, you probably don’t want to jump into a DIY carpet installation.
Lastly, installing carpet is extremely hard on your knees and your back, and it takes at least a few people to get the job done. Unfortunately, if you don’t get it right the first time, it is very easy to see where mistakes were made, and a botched carpet job can be difficult and expensive to fix. Unless you’ve done a carpet installation before and you really know what you’re getting yourself into, you’re better off leaving it to the pros
