How to Carpet Stairs
Are your heels clacking noisily every time you go down the stairs? To muffle the sound, one effective home improvement task you can do is to install carpet on your stairs. It can be challenging, but the rewards are certainly worth it. Here’s how to carpet stairs properly.
What You’ll Need:
Carpeting
Measuring tape
Circular saw
Straight edge
Utility knife
Handheld carpet stretcher
Flat, bare floor surface
Hammer
Procedure:
Choose the carpet which suits your stairs well. Pick a color that suits your home design best, and a thickness that won’t hinder steps, and won’t cause injury. One effective tactic is to pick pile berber carpets or texture cut carpet. These are thicker, but easy to use on stairs.
Get the measuring tape and start by getting the width of the stairway, as well as each individual stair’s length. It’s tempting to lay down a carpet as a single, long piece, but never do this; it can become loose in a few months and be a dangerous tripping hazard. Make sure to measure the stair’s depth and add it to the height, coming from the lower step.
Using the straightedge and utility knife, cut one piece of carpet for every step on the stair. Carefully flip the carpet over, making the cuts from the underside. Do this on a surface that you can scar or cut, but without doing any serious damage. If you make the pieces a bit larger than the measurements, it’s all right, because you can trim the excess edges later on.
Cut tackless fastening strips or tack strips for the floor, using the same measurements you used on the carpeting. These are small wood lengths with barbed tacks on the top. The carpet will stick to it when it’s laid down. There are also nails driven through the strips, so securely nailing them to the floor is easy.
Carefully lay a tack strip on each of the stairway’s side, at both the vertical inclines, as well as the horizontal steps. Use a hammer to secure the strips’ nails in place.
Lay down the first piece of carpeting on the bottom step, fitting it in place snugly. There must be a small amount of carpeting flap that goes up the incline, towards the second step left at the carpet piece’s top.
Start at the bottom of the carpeting, and put the handheld carpet stretcher half an inch away from the carpet’s sides. Carefully strike the stretcher’s back using your hammer, so the carpeting will be seated on the tack strip underneath it. Perform this on both sides, working your way up, until you manage to fix the whole carpet piece, but leaving the flat at the top unattached.
Put the next carpeting piece on the next step. Make sure its bottom edge slips under the previous strip’s flap. Seal the carpet on the strips, like you did before.
Repeat the previous step, until you carpet the whole stairway.
If there are excess carpeting on the stairs’ sides, trim them off.
Some Tips
Order an extra foot or two of carpet in case you measure incorrectly.
Always use a carpet stretcher, otherwise the carpet will bunch up.
Wear safety gloves when working, to protect yourself.
A properly carpeted stairs will look lovely, and will prevent too much noise. Just follow these steps and you’ll do this home improvement task without any worries.