The House of Rock has over 1200 sq feet of carpet within its walls. The Carpet is spread across 8 rooms:
1st floor: bedroom, dining room, living room
2nd floor: 4 bedrooms, hall+stairs
Carpet replacement comes in three steps
1. remove the old stuff
2. lay down packing
3. lay down the carpet
I contacted two companies to start: Empire Today (national) and Colonial Flooring (local). Both companies came in at roughly the same price. Empire at $4500 Colonial started at $5000. In typical salesperson fashion, both companies ‘started’ at pricing much higher ($8000 and $6000 respectively) and then found ways to reduce the price down to those above.
Affordable carpet (not the cheapest, but certainly not the most lush) runs at about $1.20/sq foot for material. With 1200 sq feet, I’m looking at ~$1,500 for the material – the rest is packing and labor.
Perhaps the easiest way to reduce cost is to do the demolition yourself. That took $500 off the Empire today quote, and $600 off the Colonial quote. Colonial, being a local provider, was more flexible in their negotiation and ultimately offered me $3500 to Empire’s $4000.
Let’s talk Demolition.
Things you need: 1 sharp box cutter, gloves, safety masks
Cutting the carpet in 3 foot sections makes it much easier to handle. While the Empire Today guy was visiting us, he showed us a quick and easy way to pull up, and manage used carpet. We took a video to share the tricks with you! Check it out:
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/81932168[/vimeo]
(note: I am wearing a sweet DJ Lokash tshirt.)
Next comes the packing, or the carpet pad. Packing is rated by density and thickness. 6lb and 8lb are fairly standard on the weight side. That’s pounds per cubic foot packing. In the ideal world you’d like to have a thicker softer pad for living areas and a thinner denser pad for high traffic areas. In the case of our place, we chose to stick with the affordable. Since we won’t be living there, there is no guarantee that the carpet won’t be damaged by rough living. So I’ll likely find myself replacing the carpet again in 10 years no matter what.
I’m hoping to have all the old carpet up and out before Christmas then it’s on to the next project!