Carpet for Cottleville bedrooms
and the stair run that reaches them

The useful question in Cottleville is not what carpet is made of, which the carpet pillar already covers. It is what happens when carpet goes into housing this new. With 51.5 percent of the city's units finished during the 2010s and another 20.4 percent during the 2000s, the job here is rarely a repair and nearly always a fit. Fit in this stock comes down to two heights and one wrap, and every one of them sits either on the bottom step or in a doorway at the top of the run.

The bottom tread is where a Cottleville carpet job is won or lost

In a plan of this age the carpet does not run out at a wall. It runs out on the lowest step, against whatever hard surface the builder ran through the main level, and that is the one junction in the whole job everybody sees and most people feel. The height has to be right within very little. New carpet over new cushion is rarely the same build up as what came out, so the tread can finish proud of the floor it lands on or shy of it, and either reads as a mistake even to somebody who could not say why.

How the run is wrapped at that step matters as much as the height. A bottom tread that is square, one that is rounded over, and one that returns past the stringer on an open side are three different pieces of hand work with three different material allowances. It is also the part of the stair a visitor looks at from the room rather than from the flight. So the step gets described properly at the measure, along with what is running through the main level for it to land against.

Where the Cottleville builder package puts carpet, and where it stops

Housing finished during the 2010s tends to arrive with the same division of labor. A hard surface runs the main level, and carpet starts at the bottom of the stairs and covers everything above. So the work is a stair run, an upper hall, three or four bedrooms and their closets, and it has exactly two edges: the bottom tread, and the doorways at the top.

The doorways at the top are the quieter of the two edges, and the ones people forget. Each is a place where the upper floor meets a threshold a builder set to a pile that is not the pile going down, and every bedroom door up there was hung to that same pile. Both get recorded at the measure, because a difference you can feel with a bare foot is a difference you will notice for years.

Not every Cottleville address is a house standing on its own

72.0 percent of the city's housing units are single unit detached. The remainder is attached and multi unit housing, and a stair in a building like that behaves differently. The run is often narrower, it may turn, and it frequently opens straight into the entry instead of into a hall, so the wrap at the nosing is the first thing a visitor sees. Carpet on a stair like that is counted tread by tread, not estimated by the running yard.

One trip in from Cottleville, and the samples that go home

The showroom sits about 15 road miles west of Cottleville at 15570 Veterans Memorial Pkwy in Wentzville, roughly a twenty minute drive, which is short enough to spend twice and long enough to want the first trip to count. Bring the stair count and a photograph of the main level material the run has to land against. The finalists go home with you, because carpet is the one thing on our floor that will not settle an argument under store lighting, and the carpet page sets out why. The Cottleville page has the drive and the showroom details in full.

The list we actually work through in a Cottleville bedroom

• The finished height on the bottom tread, taken against the material actually running the main level
• The finished height at each doorway on the upper floor, which a builder set to a pile that is not the one going down
• How the bottom step is shaped, and whether the run has to return past an open stringer
• Whether the builder's tack strip is sound, correctly spaced from the wall, and right for the backing going down

Picking a fiber for one hallway and one flight

The soft flooring in this plan is a short list of rooms served by a single route, so the wear arrives concentrated rather than spread. Everything that happens upstairs crosses the same landing and comes off the same flight, which makes the traffic lane narrow, obvious and hard on a pile. A construction that holds its face in that lane is worth more here than one that feels best in the hand across a counter, because the lane is what the floor gets judged on in five years.

Mohawk, SmartStrand, Godfrey Hirst, DreamWeaver, Pet Premier and Anything Goes are all on our floor, and the honest way to separate them is with samples underfoot in your own hallway rather than a specification sheet. What drives the number on the quote is covered on carpet cost factors.

If soft is not the answer on the Cottleville upper floor

Some owners want the stairs and hall to match the main level instead of breaking from it. That is a fair question in a 2010s plan where the two are visible from each other, and it is worth reading carpet against luxury vinyl plank before deciding. If the answer is a hard surface upstairs, we cover it at laminate in Cottleville and luxury vinyl plank in Cottleville, and the wood version of the argument sits on solid hardwood in Cottleville.