When we moved here in 2012 the entire house was carpeted in a creamy beige coloured carpet and it looked quite good. I don't think that it had been particularly well fitted, as the lounge, landing and bedroom carpets were loose, but compared to some of the other workmanship it wasn't too bad. I gave it a good go over with a professional carpet cleaner before we moved the furniture in, and it came up quite nice, so we lived with it. It's been cleaned a couple more times in the intervening years but by 2023 it was starting to look really tired and stained in the high traffic areas.
Sitting on the sofa one afternoon I discovered the it wouldn't cost too much to replace the lounge carpet, so started investigating. Like all plans, that soon snowballed from "Lets replace the lounge carpet" to "They all currently match, lets just do the whole house" and so "Operation Carpet" came into being!
Everyone I spoke to said I was mad, "It's too big a job", "It's too hard", "What if you mess it up" etc. In fact the only person that didn't seem perturbed by the fact that I was going to do it myself was the nice men that actually delivered the new carpet and kindly helped me to carry it into the house.
I on the other hand thought that moving all the furniture would be the worst bit, and if I've got to do the worst bit then why pay someone to do the easy bit. So I booked a week off work over Easter 2023 and between us we cracked on.
Hmmm, that's a lot of carpet!
Day 1 - Note the colour of the original carpet.
Back to the 1960's tiles (nice).
Underlay - Note that I ended up working around the sofa's as there just wasn't anywhere else to put them - Far from ideal!
Learning on the job.
How the hell do you do this bit - The only frustration of the whole job!
We have got far too much stuff!
Ideal opportunity to fix the creaky floor boards.
Spare bedroom in underlay.
Unrolling it and getting it into the right place is a major battle in it's own right.
Slowly getting the hang of it!
I certainly don't want to bang a screw through that little lot - Sorting out creaky floorboards in the main bedroom.
Floor screwed down and fully lined to level out the boards.
Looking good - Just the small issue of trimming down 7 doors to fit over the new carpet!
Screwing down the landing floor - There's approximately 700 new screws gone into the floors upstairs to stop the boards creaking and moving!
It makes me feel a bit sick that picture because it's the wrong way round! - Landing floor hardboard lined ready for carpeting.
It was a fiddly one that!
That explains why the stairs creak and flex as you walk up them then. - Cracked treads!
Creak prevention.
Cracked treads, plated, bonded and screwed - No more creaks!
Coming down the stairs.
I'm happy with that and I'm watching you Mrs Cat with your claws!
That's the best I can do, so it'll have to do!
It's surprising what's hidden under the carpet!
Old underlay patchwork quilt.
The last of the underlay.
Job done!
And there we have it. 6 days from start to finish and a massive joint effort between me and "The Emma". I'm not going to pretend it was easy, because it was anything but. I've got more holes in my fingertips from the gripper bars than I know what to do with, and there's muscles in my wrists that hurt that I didn't know existed. But so worth it to be able to wander round the house and say "We did that".
And as for getting someone in to do the job for us. Well as I said at the start, the worst bit was moving everything to get at the floor. And when you look at everything else I did at the same time, from screwing down a hundred creaky floorboards, to lining all the upstairs floor's, to fixing the creaky stairs and the big crack in the hall, to trimming down 8 doors. Well we'd have needed more than a carpet fitter to sort that little lot out!
Oh, and to all those doubters that said, "Surely your not going to do that yourself", I think the pictures speak for themselves!