Flooring in Beiseker, Alberta

Beiseker project

Stair and floor carpet from one dye lot

Carpet is where ordering mistakes cost the most. It comes off a roll in fixed widths, so the seam layout is drawn room by room and the stairs are counted step by step, landings and any bullnose included, before the order goes in. Everything on the job is cut from the same dye lot.

On the day, the old carpet, underpad and staples come out, damaged tack strip is replaced, and the new carpet is power stretched in the rooms and wrapped tight over each stair nosing. Keep a labelled offcut from the same lot for any repair later on.

Pictured: our Beiseker project – curved staircase with new beige carpet wrapped over each tread and a black iron railing.

See carpet installation

Measure the rooms, not the house

A house area figure is a useful number for almost everything except ordering flooring.

Rooms are what get floored, and rooms are irregular. Closets, alcoves, angled walls, a bay, the space behind a swinging door, the landing at the top of a stair: all of it consumes material, and none of it appears in a single total. Doorways matter too, because a run continuing through an opening behaves differently from two rooms treated separately.

Stairs are the clearest case. A staircase is counted tread by tread rather than converted into an area. A winder or a landing changes that count again. When an estimate is badly wrong, a stair is usually somewhere in the explanation.

So the sequence is a room-by-room list first, then a site measure, then an order. Any price given before we measure is a preliminary figure, and we charge based on the written quote that follows.

Waste factor, dye lots and the piece you will want in three years

Three ordering details cause most of the arguments in this trade, and all three are avoidable.

The waste factor is the allowance for cuts, pattern repeat, layout and off-cuts. It exists on every job. We would rather show it as a line than fold it into a total, because a stated allowance is one you can question and an unstated one is one you cannot.

Dye lots are the second. Carpet, tile and printed vinyl are produced in batches, and batches drift slightly in shade. A patch ordered eighteen months later is unlikely to match the floor it is going into. Ordering the whole job at once, including the allowance, deals with that.

The third is attic stock. A few spare boards or a carpet remnant from the original batch turns a future repair from a visible one into an invisible one. It is worth keeping, and it is worth keeping properly.

Where material waits, and why that matters here

Flooring should acclimate in the space it is going into, at the temperature and humidity that space will normally hold.

That rules out the two places material usually ends up on a rural property: an unheated shop and a garage. Neither is anything like the heated room the floor will live in, and wood that equalises out there arrives at the room already wrong.

Winter delivery adds one more step. Material brought in cold should not be opened and installed the same hour. Give it time in the heated space, and use a meter on both the flooring and the subfloor rather than a number of days from a rule of thumb.