Thinking of laying a carpet?

If you are planning on taking on the DIY challenge of laying your own carpet, you need to gather as much advice as possible and we have several projects which will provide all you need to know.

Firstly you need to have measured your floor accurately before ordering your carpet – take a look at our measuring floors project for guidance if you have a tricky area to measure. This is a good time to sort out any creaky floorboards you may have with floors or stairs. Again this is not a quick job but if you can remedy the squeaks, it will be a job well worth doing!

Before you actually start laying the carpet, make sure you have hired or bought a carpet knee kicker to stretch the carpet, as well as a carpet bolster and knee pads.
You then need to install your gripper round the outside of the room, followed by laying your underlay within this area. There is help and advice on different types of underlay available and how to lay underlay on our project page.

When you have your gripper and underlay down, you have the task of actually laying the carpet. As it says in our project page on laying a carpet, when you roll the carpet out, make sure if there is any pattern to the carpet that it is square to the walls. Then follow the instructions and take your time. This is definately not a task to be rushed, as mistakes could be costly!

There is also a project page giving step by step advice on laying stair carpet, which is quite a tricky job to get right, but a good skill to gain!