Carpet Transition

Every hardwood install will run into another type of flooring at one point. In this house there are two rooms with a carpet / wood border and four areas that border with tile, plus one transition with the front door. This weekend I'm working on the carpet / wood borders.

I have one where it's a simple doorway, and another more difficult area about 10 feet long between the entry way and living room. For reasons unknown I decided to try the harder one first. Anyway the first step is to nail in the tack strip that will hold the carpet down, about a half inch from the wood. On a wood subfloor this is easy, but on concrete... not so much. I recommend removing the all-purpose nails the tack strip will have preinstalled because they will just bend and chip the concrete. Then get a pack of plastic concrete screw anchors and some aluminum nails. Drill a hole the appropriate size for the plastic screw anchor and the tack strip, then drive in the aluminum nail. The aluminum nail will conform to fit the hole, locking it all in place. But before you do this, make sure the tack strip is facing the right direction! Go ahead, ask me how I know about that one...

So now that the tack strip is installed go ahead and cut back the foam padding so that it's about half to a quarter inch from the tack strip. Next get the carpet stretcher (you can rent these from pretty much any tool rental place and stretch the carpet. Attach it to the tack strip by folding it over from the carpeted area so that it engages the tacks. In other words, fold the end of the carpet back away from the wood and sort of roll it towards the tack strip. Rub the area over the tacks with a clean hammer to set them in the carpet. Repeat as necessary to work the width of the transition area. Cut the carpet so that it extends about 1/4 inch over the wood.

Lastly, run a bead of adhesive along the base of the wood and use a putty knife to tuck in the edge of the carpet. Don't walk on the area for a while to give the glue a chance to dry.

When you're done it will look a lot like this:





This weekend I got all the carpet / wood transitions done and worked some more on the baseboards. We're caulking on both the top and bottom. It's easy, just time consuming. The last things left to do are find, stain and cut the reducer pieces, clean up and take pictures for a before / after post.