Hallway carpet: done! - Lansdowne Life

I’m so excited our hallway carpet is done! I laid every last inch of it myself and have the dull carpet knife to prove it.

The base molding still needs to be replaced and I need to get some of those metal strips for the edges. The carpet tiles have a heavy backing and they don’t require any sort of threshold strips, but I need to hide my raggedy edges.

Amazingly, I didn’t take a photo of the carpet before we ripped it up. This is the only photo of it I could find, though it proves it wasn’t much to look at. Boring, beige, matted. Please ignore dazed kitty.

This is what we found when we pulled up the carpet and padding. Strange tile. Not quite sure what it was exactly. It wasn’t linoleum. Let’s hope it wasn’t something toxic.

After my dad scraped off the tile, we discovered the hardwood floor underneath wasn’t in that great of shape.

There is a large ugly patch job, which I’m guessing was once a return air vent? It’s either that or there’s treasure buried beneath the plywood.

Before I laid down the carpet tiles, my dad put a bunch of screws into the wood to try to minimize some of the outrageous squeaks. It didn’t eliminate the squeaks entirely, but they are much quieter.

I didn’t think that I would be able to match the pattern of the tiles at all. The whole process was like putting together a puzzle when I wasn’t even sure I had any matching pieces, but I found enough tiles that “connected” to run a long stretch down the middle. I decided to run the turn the tiles along the baseboards 90 degrees. There was no chance to match the pattern, and I thought it might look more purposeful if the tiles were turned.