When we moved into the house, the two bedrooms had gross old carpet in them. Our room had mystery stains on the carpet and the spare room carpet was threadbare. The carpet had to go – but what would we do to the floors instead?
We agreed that carpet was the best way to go, otherwise we’d have to get the floors varnished AND get rugs for them. It’s nice to have warm feet in the winter time! Darren’s mum, Irene, works at Interface NZ, a sustainable carpet/flooring company who have been featured in the documentary “The Corporation” for their sustainable business practices. We decided to start talking to her about what they do and stock. Then it turned out that in their stocktake, they were getting rid of some modular carpet tiles and Irene’s boss very generously offered that we could have them. We were off to a great start – not only carbon zero and sustainable, but very budget positive.
Labour Weekend loomed, so we decided that this was a logical time to tackle the project – we’d hopefully get it done in two days so we could have a bit of a weekend rest as well. We started pulling up the carpet early on the Saturday morning, and much to our dismay there were HEAPS of carpet tacks underneath. We could tell it was going to be a long one – and it definitely was.
Day 1
We worked through our room, getting as many of the carpet staples out as we could – it was back-breaking work with a pair of pliers each. If a tack came out cleanly it was a bonus and almost balanced out the times where the tacks were so rusted they just broke. Getting those out was a real chore and often just came down to brute strength.
The spare room is about equal in floor space to our room but has a slightly different layout. It also had much older carpet with this sort of hessian/hairy underlay which puffed up huge clouds of dust. My theory was that this was the original carpet which had been in the room when the house was first built – not sure but the fact that it was completely threadbare and had the weird underlay sort of backed me up. Luckily, even though the carpet seemed older, there were less tacks and this room wasn’t quite as tiring.
By the time we were finished and had mopped the floor it had been well over 8 hours of work and we were EXHAUSTED.
Day 2
Darren’s parents arrived first thing with the carpet tiles. We decided to put the dark grey ones in our room and the stripey ones in the spare room. After a fortifying cup of coffee we decided to start in under Irene’s careful instruction.
The modular carpet tiles are amazing – and it is so reassuring to know that if you completely mess one up or it gets stained you can swap it out just like that! It is best to start from the doorway and work around the room. The cutting of the tiles is what takes the most time and then you just stick them down with extremely strong double-sided tape. We kind of worked out systems and each member of the team had a role which would then change depending on what else needed to be done.
The day was super long and by the time we were done, everyone’s arms and backs were aching. The only thing to do was take photos and eat fish and chips to celebrate, so that is what we did!