Removing old flooring and installing new carpet can make all the difference in a room. The new color and fresh walking surface can make the whole house feel new. The big benefits of new carpeting can make it tempting to opt for frequent updates to your floor covering and to help lower the cost by doing the installation yourself. While installing new carpeting may sound like a good idea, there are plenty of reasons why it’s not. Here are six things to think about when you’re choosing between professional installation and DIY.
1- Waste is Not an Option
Unlike painting and other DIY projects, carpet installation is very unforgiving in terms of wasting or running out of materials. If you waste a little paint and come up short, you just buy another can. If you cut too much off the carpet, you’ll never be able to make it look right without replacing the entire piece.
2- Proper Installation Requires Specialized Tools
Laying carpet requires high-quality knives, carpet stretchers, knee kickers, and seam rollers. Chances are the only one you currently own is a knife. That means you’ll be buying the rest of them, and those tools are not cheap. In addition, it may be years before you use them again. A one-time use is not a good investment.
3- Many Hands Make Light Work
A piece of new carpet big enough for a whole room is heavy, big, and very awkward to handle. Just getting it into the house is an all-hands job. Once you get it in the room, you must be able to position it correctly and get it rolled out. That takes lots of help.
4- Troubleshooting Takes Experience
If everything goes according to plan, your carpet installation might not be too hard. But what happens when you finish and find a big wrinkle, or you struggle to fit the carpet around three sides of a wall? The list of potential problems is much longer than the solutions your experience has built, but a pro can handle them.
5- Your Time is Money, Too
A professional carpet crew can get a room finished quickly and efficiently. Doing it yourself will take much longer, leaving your house disrupted with relocated furniture and an unusable room. To get the job done, you may have to burn some valuable vacation time or a Saturday when you could be doing other things. Remember that the money you save may be lost elsewhere.
6- It’s Just Not as Easy as It Looks
Experience is probably the most powerful tool that your installation crew will bring. They’ve done dozens of rooms and worked around every kind of obstacle you can imagine. You’ll easily recover their charges through the headaches you avoid, the materials you don’t waste, the tools you don’t have to buy, and the collateral damage you avoid. Choose your carpet, then contact a great installation company so that you can move your furniture and let a pro take it from there.