#DIY Carpet Installation

     We've been needing to get new carpet in Chloe & Lily's room since we moved here 7 years ago!  The carpet itself was really nice, but it was white and had several questionable stains!  We covered the stains with the furniture and it worked out great.  Then last year happened!  After eating pizza, my niece got sick and added another irremovable stain to the carpet!  And Chloe dropped bright orange nail polish on the white carpet.  Yeah, it was time to get rid of it.
     For Christmas, we were gifted with some money to replace the carpet.  I went out and looked at a few carpet stores and realized that it was going to cost over $700 to get the carpet and have it installed.  This was more than our gift and I knew that Ryan could do the job.  He'd done in the toy room a few years ago.  So I heard Mendards calling my name!
     The bedroom is just the right size because the carpet doesn't need to be pieced together.  That way we can use the carpet right off the roll.  The carpet that we install has the pad attached to the bottom.  The padding isn't that thick but we were going to put the new carpet on top of the existing pad (our pad was in good shape, had no stains, tears or smells)  Menards was also running a sale on their carpet and all items had a 30% rebate!  So we saved money with Ryan's installation (cost of carpet- $300)and got a nice rebate check to use on something else- probably more carpet for Andrew's room!

     Ryan first cut the carpet into strips and rolled it up to get it out of the bedroom.  Then we brought in the new roll of carpet.  It was CrAzY heavy.  Andrew helped us out but it was so hard trying to get it up our steep stairs and over the rail.  Once we got the carpet up, Ryan unrolled it and laid it out in the room.  He then matched one end up against the wall and started cutting (using a straight razor) the carpet to match up to the heater vent and window woodwork.

  
     This was the hardest part, because even though the room is a square, there's a lot of molding around the floor and windows that needed to be trimmed.  Once Ryan got all of the carpet trimmed up, he then flipped one side of the carpet over, so that like sides were touching (no pics of this)  With padding attached to the carpet, you don't need to use the tack strips with nails.  Instead, you just use double sided tape!  That's right- heavy duty double sided tape.

     Ryan put the double sided tape onto the padding and then adhered it to the floor.  He then flipped the other half of the carpet over and did the same thing.  The best part was when we called the kids up and they had to roll the carpet down, to get the tape stuck really good!  We did this same thing in the toy room, 2 years ago.  The toy room is used A LOT and is also a walk through to the downstairs bathroom.  We've had NO problems with the carpet moving or peeling up.  In fact, you can't even tell that it was installed by my AWESOME hubby.  The only thing that he couldn't do was roll the carpet over when it met up with the door.  So we just purchased a trim that's meant to match carpet together.  Ryan screwed it into the sub floor where the hallway and bedroom meet up.  The girls now love their stain free carpet.  Plus with the extra padding, it's so comfortable!