Carpet installation in University City, MO

Upstairs is the obvious place. In a University Heights Tudor the bedrooms sit over plaster ceilings and a hall that carries every sound, and carpet with a good pad quiets the whole floor. It is warmer in a January bedroom over an uninsulated porch roof, and it is softer for kids and for anyone tired of stepping onto a cold floor at six in the morning before the radiators catch up.

Finished basements are the other place, though we point people toward carpet tile or a low pile with a moisture-tolerant backing if the room has ever been damp. Stairs are the third. A steep, narrow prewar staircase with worn treads is safer carpeted, and it stops the whole house from hearing every trip to the second floor. Rentals near the Loop use carpet in the bedrooms for the same reasons.

Pulling old carpet in a U City house is half discovery. Underneath there is usually original oak strip, and before we put new carpet down we will show you what it looks like. Plenty of homeowners change their minds at that moment and have us sand the wood instead. If carpet is still the plan, the oak takes tack strip fine and nothing about the floor is lost by covering it.

The prep is real work. Old tack strip along a plaster wall has to come out without taking chunks of plaster with it, staples have to be pulled rather than pounded flat, and a squeaky board is worth screwing down while the floor is open anyway. Stairs get measured tread by tread. A hundred-year-old staircase is rarely uniform, and cutting as though it is shows up immediately from the bottom step.

It starts with a free in-home measure, so the seams can be planned before anything is ordered. In a U City house full of small rooms and doorways, seam placement decides whether the finished job looks right, and that cannot be worked out from a floor plan. You look at samples at home and at the showroom, and Erik will explain what a roll width means for your particular hallway before you commit.

Order to install is usually one to two weeks depending on the mill. On the day, the crew moves furniture, pulls and hauls the old carpet and pad, preps the subfloor, sets fresh tack strip, and stretches the carpet properly with a power stretcher instead of kicking it into place. Most upstairs jobs finish inside a day. You walk the rooms with the crew before they pack the truck.