The Dot Com Miner

For a time I was in the residential rental business. Sometimes I was not as choosey as I should have been when it came to accepting new tenants. Sometimes the new tenants came from a different province, where it wasn’t so easy to check their history.

Tenants moving out were not always happy campers. The building I rented out was not very new. The insulation in the walls was rudimentary. Not all tenants used the furnace sparingly. Some kept their living area as hot as a greenhouse. On occasions, this made for a large heating bill, which they were responsible for paying to me.

On more than one occasion, I nearly had to shovel out the dirt left on the floor of the vacated apartment. The carpets could only take so much abuse. I could clean off the dirt with my carpet cleaner, but holes and wear spots were another matter.

It was time to buy a new carpet for the unit. This was something new for me. I had never replaced a carpet before. I did a lot of measuring of the room where the new carpet was to go. To make the job more challenging there were built in cupboards along the wall of the room, which jetted about half a foot out from the wall. Some very exact measuring was needed.

I took my specifications to the local carpet store. I wanted a low priced non-shag, greyish coloured carpet. The clerk had something that would do the job for about $300.00. The carpet was cut to my measurements and loaded into my car. That was the easy part of the job.

The old carpet had to come up off the floor but it had been glued on so first of all, the floor moulding strips bordering the walls were carefully removed, then the tedious back breaking work began. The old carpet had to be ripped up, and levered, off the floor using a crowbar. That took some time and effort to finish. Then the floor was vacuumed clean of dust, and carpet fragments. The walls and the carpet were measured again to be safe. The pieces that needed cutting out of the sides of the carpet were removed. The carpet was then stretched out to test how it looked in place. It looked like all the measuring had paid off. Everything looked correct.

I had an acquaintance help me with the gluing down of the carpet. With the carpet rolled up and squared off against one wall an edge was glued down. Then little by little, the floor was glued, ahead of the carpet being unrolled. The carpet was stretched out on the glued area on the floor. Surprisingly the carpet laying went quite well. It looked straight against all the walls. We did some walking on the carpet for a few minutes, to be sure it was pressed tight to the floor. In a day or so I had nailed the floor moulding strips back in place. It was a lot of work but made a big difference to the look of the apartment.

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Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Carpets
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