Are you installing new carpet and flooring in your home? The carpet and flooring you install in your home will have a huge impact on the look and feel of the entire home. The floor is continuous, so a poor carpet and flooring choice in one room will affect the visual impact of every other room in the house.
We’re so committed to helping you make the best carpet and flooring choices you possibly can that we’ve put together a list of common mistakes people make while installing carpet and flooring. We want you to not make these mistakes:
Three Common Mistakes People Make While Installing Carpet and Flooring
- MISTAKE: Not allowing enough time for hardwood floor installation.
While shopping for flooring, wood floor materials is desirable by many homeowners. In fact, wood floors is at the top of the list of factors that home shoppers look for in potential homes. Beautiful wood floors give a home a timeless and warm feeling. If the work is done right, the hardwood floors will last for the life of the home, and only look better with time.
However, wood flooring is a natural material and as such, they are porous. Wood floors respond to the temperature and moisture in the air, and must be finished properly or they won’t stand the test of time. You might figure that your wood flooring installation will take four or five days for the work itself, but you’ll need to add in additional time for the floors to be sealed properly, and to set. During this time, you won’t be able to bring furniture in — you really can’t even walk on it. In other words, you won’t be able to stay in your home. Yes, it can be a hassle to allow your wood flooring this additional time, but it would be a shame if you don’t allow for the extra time, and then your wood floors warp within a year, because they weren’t sealed properly. - MISTAKE: Hiring a contractor based only on cost.
You’ll probably want to shop around while looking for a flooring professional. Maybe you’ll get estimates from three or four places before choosing someone. This is a good idea; however, if the only thing you look at when you get the estimates is the bottom dollar, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
When you get estimates, you want to see all of the estimates within a few percentage points apart from each other — this gives you an idea of what the “going rate” for the work is. If most of the estimates are about the same, and then one guy has undercut the rest by hundreds of dollars, there’s a reason for it. All of the other contractors are not in cahoots to overcharge you, the unusually cheap flooring contractor is doing something to cut costs that you might or might not want. If the work was equal, the cut-rate flooring contractor would go out of business charging so much less. Instead, he’s cutting corners or using cheap supplies that won’t hold up long. What’s the point in saving a few hundred bucks, only to have to redo the work in just a couple years? - MISTAKE: Doing the home update in the wrong order.
When you don’t make a plan before you begin, you might end up spending twice as much on the project when work has to be redone, or you might paint yourself into a corner (pun intended) and get stuck with features you didn’t want. This is particularly true when your renovation involves flooring.
For some reason, it seems intuitive to install the cabinets in your kitchen before you do the flooring. However, when you do this, you can’t put the new flooring under your new cabinets. You can install the new flooring around the cabinets, but if there is any difference in the thickness of the flooring, it will create an unsightly seem around the base of the cabinets. Additionally, it locks you into the design of the cabinets. You can’t ever change your cabinets, since the floor underneath won’t match the rest of the floor in the rest of the kitchen.
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