Carpet in Old Monroe,
planned around what is under it

Carpet is an easy thing to sell badly in a town built like this one. Old Monroe holds 91 housing units on 0.362 square miles, 73.6 percent of them single unit detached, 81.6 percent owner occupied, and the median one was finished in 1960. Put those four numbers together and you get a place where almost nobody is specifying a floor to get through a lease, nobody has a builder spec to match, and nearly every house has something under the current carpet that a quote written over the phone would have walked straight past. How fiber, twist and density actually work is the job of the carpet pillar. This page is about what carpet has to do once it is inside one of these particular houses.

Chosen by an owner who is not going anywhere

At 81.6 percent owner occupied, the person standing in the room with us is almost always the person who will still be walking that hallway years from now. That changes the specification more than any trend does. We are not picking something to look clean for one showing, we are picking something that will take the same three walking lines every day, the same dog, the same chair legs at the same table, and still be worth keeping. It also means the honest answer is sometimes to carpet fewer rooms and do them properly, which is not a conversation that happens where a floor only has to last until the next tenant.

Tack strip has to bite into whatever 1960 left behind

Stretched carpet lives or dies on its perimeter, and the perimeter here is old. With a median build year of 1960, plank subfloor is a live possibility rather than a curiosity, and plank changes both the strip and the fastener: the anchor has to find solid board rather than the gap beside it, and a run set to the wall alone is not the same as a run set to what is actually under it. It may equally be going into plywood, into a patched section by a doorway where a previous covering was cut in, or into something that has already been fastened twice. We check the edge condition before we quote, because a strip that cannot hold is a stretch that will not hold, and finding that out on install day is how a perimeter repair gets done in the middle of a stretch instead of before it.

Seams in rooms that were framed before open plan

Broadloom comes in fixed widths and mid century rooms do not care. In houses of this vintage the bedrooms and the hall are often narrower than the goods, so material has to be cut down to a room rather than the room being covered as it comes. That makes the decisions at an Old Monroe measure how much of a fixed width a narrow room actually takes, what becomes of the remainder, and where the seam falls relative to the window, because a seam that disappears against a shaded wall can show plainly where light rakes across the pile. We settle that on site with the room in front of us. We also compare doorway heights while we are there, because when the neighboring room ends up as something else the transition has to reconcile two thicknesses, not just cover a gap.

One elevation for the whole town, two answers inside the house

The town sits wholly on the north bank of the Cuivre, and MoDOT's city map shows the limits stopping at the water on the south and southeast. That puts all of Old Monroe on valley floor rather than spread between a bottom and a hilltop. There is no higher half of town here, so the choice that elsewhere gets made between one address and another has to be made inside a single house: not whether carpet belongs in Old Monroe, but which floor of your own house it belongs on. We come out to answer that one. We take a reading under the floor where there is access, we look at how the lower level is actually lived in, and then we say which floors we would carpet and which we would hand to something else. Where that is the lower one, luxury vinyl plank in Old Monroe takes that level and carpet stays upstairs where it belongs.

Moving a roll into town when the river is up

Broadloom arrives as a long, heavy roll that has to physically get into the house. It is 20.7 road miles NE from the showroom, about 29 minutes, and Route C ends at Missouri Route 79 in the middle of town, so the last of that drive is a corridor high water has closed before. During the 2019 Mississippi River flooding, MoDOT announced on May 30, 2019 that it had closed Missouri Route 79 near Highway C and south of the Cuivre River. We confirm the route before a roll is cut and loaded, and we would rather move a delivery date by a few days than have your material sitting on the wrong side of a closure.

The carpet lines we can order for a house here

For an Old Monroe job we can order Mohawk, Godfrey Hirst, DreamWeaver, SmartStrand, Pet Premier and Anything Goes. Which belongs in your rooms is answered with the samples in the house rather than in a paragraph, because a household with a dog and a back door onto bottomland wants something different from a quiet upstairs bedroom. A house like this often ends up zoned rather than uniform, so if wood belongs in the front rooms, see solid hardwood in Old Monroe, and the town page at Old Monroe covers how we get out here and what else we cover nearby.