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Replacing carpet in VERY crowded room!
susie-4964
Posts: 23,143 Forum Member
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The carpet in our main living room really needs to be replaced, and I'd love to have it done. Only problem is that "living" is the operative word here - there's a lot of furniture, and books and stuff on the floor, and it wouldn't be easy to move it anywhere else in the house, as this is the largest room. I've vaguely thought of actually involving a removal company, getting them to pack the stuff up and take the lot to one of these storage places for a week while the carpet is laid. Has anyone had any experience of doing this? The room really needs to be cleared properly before anything can be done.
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Furniture I can understand. "Books and stuff" belong on shelves and in cupboards, not on the floor.
Most carpet fitters require the entire room to be empty what you suggest is possible but not if you are paying to have it fitted (oddly).
You need to clear the area and it should be possible to move the room contents to another part of the house on a temporary basis.
Frankly, I don't really see the problem.
When you've got a house full of tenants and therefore limited space to move things, then I could understand.
When I want your advice on how I keep my house, I'll ask for it. Thank you to everyone else for their suggestions.
This may be true for contract fitters employed by the likes of Carpet Right etc., but it certainly isn't the case for "proper" tradesmen.
I have a self-employed friend who has been supplying and fitting carpets for 40 years (including all of mine in two houses), and he has no problem at all with furnished rooms - he simply shuffles the furniture around. Even large bookcases (for example) present no problem - he uses silicone gliders to move them with seemingly little effort.
As is the case with most competent tradesmen, he makes it look simple, even though it's far from it.
When I had the bedroom re-carpeted (by Carpet Right or one of the other biggish firms) I had to leave the pine bed frame in the room as it was too big a job to dismantle the entire thing for a couple of hours then put it back together. The fitters were fine about it and just moved it onto a fitted part of the room as they worked their way across.
You may well get away with leaving one or two items of furniture in there as long as it's easy for them to fit half the room, move the items, then do the other half.
Putting things in storage for a week for the sake of a job that will take a couple of hours seems a bit of a dramatic solution to a small problem. Can't you just stuff them in various places throughout the house for a day?
I won't admit it was easy, but we found a place for most stuff. The only things we just couldn't move were the dining table and two parts of the sofa, they were upturned and put on the dining table, and then covered up with dustsheets.
Everything survived the work, which took about three weeks. When the carpet fitters came, they helped OH move the dining table and parts of the sofa onto the drive, fitted the carpet then put it all back.
It really doesn't take long to fit a carpet. All I can advise is you box up all of the books and put them upstairs/in another room, you move everything you can out and you may find the carpet fitters willing to work round some large pieces of furniture (though they won't books and piles of things on the floor).
I've also had a through lounge carpeted at my old house and some furniture had to be moved from one end to another as they worked, they didn't mind.
You may also find this gives you a chance to de-clutter and also put up some shelves for your books/put away what you don't need.
Good luck!
That's what my cousin found. She had an emergency operation just after she'd made arrangements to have her new lounge carpet fitted. There was no way she could have moved everything, so she let the company know well in advance and the fitters were fine about it. They popped round on their way home the day before they actually started on the carpet to see what needed to be moved and what could stay, and moved as much as possible in under an hour. The next day they came back to do the actually fitting, and put everything back in place afterwards. I think as long as they know in advance rather than turn up expecting a cleared room only to find a full one, I think most decent fitters would be fine.
We've had new flooring a couple of times recently, as we've had couple of radiator leaks, and each time all the fitters have asked is that we empty the furniture out and move it to one side of the room before they get there.
Explain the problem to a fitter, some may say "no" outright but if you can probably come to an agreement with an extra payment and say you'll be there to move the furniture for them.
carpet place just said move the sofa to one end of the room and they will put it back when they are done