How long does carpet installation take?

What the crew is actually doing in there

The part everybody pictures, rolling out the new carpet, is the quick part. The old carpet gets cut into strips and carried out, the old pad comes up, and then somebody is on their knees pulling staples out of the subfloor. Tack strip gets checked all the way around the room and replaced wherever it is soft, split or set at the wrong distance from the wall. New cushion is cut, butted, taped and fastened down. Only then does the carpet come in to be rough cut, seamed and stretched.

After that comes the slow half. A power stretcher pulls the carpet tight from wall to opposite wall, the edges get tucked into the gully behind the tack strip, doorways and transitions are cut and fitted, and closets are done last because they are the fiddliest square feet in the house. A room with four straight walls and one door goes quickly. The same square footage broken into a hall, three doorways, two closets and a bay window does not.

Stairs carry the most labor per foot in the house

The in-home measure counts treads, risers, landings and nosings one at a time for a reason. On a flat floor the carpet is one piece. On a staircase it is a run of separate pieces, each one cut, fitted over the nosing, stretched and fastened, tread by tread.

How the stairs are finished changes it again. A waterfall, where the carpet runs over the nose of each tread and drops straight to the next, is the faster of the two common treatments. A cap and band, where every tread is upholstered and each riser fitted separately, is worked piece by piece and takes considerably longer. An open side with spindles is slower still, because the carpet has to be cut around each baluster. Which carpet belongs on a stair is a separate question, and the construction you land on can make the fitting easier or harder too.

Seams, and whether they have to match

Broadloom comes off the roll in a fixed width, most often twelve feet, with some lines run wider. Any room that beats that width in both directions needs a seam, and the layout decides how many there are and where they land. Each one is a job of its own: both edges trimmed dead straight, hot melt tape laid underneath, an iron run slowly along it, then the joint weighted while the adhesive sets.

A pattern adds real time here. It has to line up across the seam, so pieces get cut to the repeat rather than to the room and the match is worked by hand. Where seams fall is settled at the measure, in your house, with the daylight and the walking path in front of everybody rather than guessed from a floor plan.

Prep is the part nobody budgets time for

What is under the old carpet is invisible until the old carpet is gone, and that is where jobs gain hours. A subfloor that squeaks gets screwed down while it is exposed, because it will never be that easy to reach again. Loose or damaged panels get repaired. Old adhesive from a previous glue down has to come off. Low spots get filled. Doors may need to come off their hinges and be trimmed where the new carpet and cushion sit higher than the old ones did. If the subfloor reads damp, the reason gets found before anything covers it up. None of that shows in a square footage number, which is exactly why the measure happens before the quote instead of after it.

The room has to be ready before any of it starts

Carpet is stretched across a whole room in one operation, so the room has to be empty for the crew to work, closets included. What clearing a room actually involves is worth reading well before install week, and what is included on your job gets settled ahead of the date rather than at the door. The other thing worth settling early is whether the old cushion stays or goes, because that changes what happens in the first hour.

Install day is one line in a longer timeline

Nobody can start until the material is physically here, which is why the install date follows the delivery rather than the calendar. Something ordered in for you and something already in the building do not run on the same schedule. Our eight step process lays out the order the whole job runs in, from the first conversation to the final walkthrough. Hardwood runs on a different clock again, since wood may sit in the house before it goes down. For a real answer about your rooms, the honest route is the free measure, where somebody counts your stairs, finds your seams and looks at your subfloor. Call 636-332-0654 or come by the Wentzville showroom. The material itself is covered on the carpet page.