Finishing the Carpet

For a long time, the upstairs bedrooms in our house have been unfinished. This is mostly because of a multitide of setbacks, starting with the discovery that we had water damage at two different windows. Including the time needed to find a suitable way to replace the windows as cheaply as possible, the manufacture of the windows, and the delays in the installation process, the replacement of these windows took over a year to complete. Once that was done, we were finally able to get our insurance company to send a contractor to do a little drywall underneath both windows.

With that mess finally out of the way, I set to work looking for carpet. For some reason carpet is not very popular in France. Most homes that we have seen use parquet flooring, which can look good if a more expensive option is picked, but in our case the floor was obviously not a real hardwood floor, but rather a cheaper option. Furthermore, I don’t understand the aversion to using carpet in the bedrooms, where they add a soft touch and feel warmer than a cold wooden floor. This is a country where the weather is cold for half of the year, and for three months it’s miserably cold. What little carpet is available is mostly very thin, which feels more appropriate in a commercial setting than in the home.

After finally finding the carpet I wanted, I was worried about the price but finally made the decision to buy. Of course at this point the carpet was no longer available and the store had completely stopped stocking any more carpet of that particular brand. I despaired of finding something else that I actually wanted to install in my home of all the hundreds of paper-thin and rough carpets to be found on the internet. I was therefore very pleased to find a different store that had something very simiilar to my previous choice, and I bought it immediately. It’s always a bit unsettling to spend over a thousand euros on a single purchase, but after what I had been through, I was ready to pay to get what I wanted.

Of course, I still had research to do before I could install the carpet. I had considered putting a layer underneath the carpet, primarily for insulation. After searching around and reading a lot of information on the subject, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t really necessary, and that the type of carpet that I had chosen could be installed all by itself.

The installation process itself was not too difficult. The main issue was completely removing everything from each bedroom, one at a time. We removed a sublayer from one of the rooms to find it had been attached by glue, which was now a potent yellow dust that needed to be cleaned up. The other rooms didn’t have this problem, but I did have to almost completely disassemble my daughter’s IKEA bed in order to remove it from the room. The actual installation of the carpet just involved careful measurements and planning for the cuts of the carpet. I knew that I would have to join different cuts in a couple rooms, but I wanted to minimize that.

Now that the work is pretty much done, I’m very happy with the look and feel. Most importantly, everyone is finally back in their own bedrooms for good. I still have some work to do to get a new bed installed for our son and build a wardrobe in our bedroom, but at the very least we have more breathing room now.