The time had come to start searching for carpet, and with a few leads, Cass and I headed out to go looking at a few options.  Colours, textures, stainguard or not, etc…  An annoyance when it comes to things like these, is the simple onslaught of options available to choose from, and then the salesmen sizing you up to see where their profit is.

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that when your buying retail, you’re getting bent over hard, and to know it before you walk into the store, and to know they know it as well when they try to “sell” you is even more annoying, but when you don’t deal with these things on a daily basis, how are you to come by better pricing?  Thus the game.

At the bottom of the list of options was an ad placed on Kijiji for a chunk of carpet that seemed worth a look.  Having tiled the kitchen area, I no longer had to find volume in one colour, and I thought this ad would do for the bedroom carpet.

That ad turned out to be an installers son selling off his Dads’ cutoff inventory, and had a whole garage full of chunks at wholesale prices.  I walked away from there with carpet, underlay, and the name of a good installer.

I had every intention of doing it myself, but after talking with this guy for a bit, I decided I was out of my depth, and thought of it instead as insurance because you don’t get two tries….  By the end, I was still ahead of where I would have been if I had bought even the carpet retail.

So, on with the pictures.  The first thing that needs to be said here is that this came on awful fast.  I bought the carpet and underlay on a Friday, and they were coming Monday.  The bedroom was FULL of the “everything”, and hadn’t been prepared at all, so it all had to be moved (which was a chore on it’s own), the tiles had to come up, baseboards  located, sanded,  Verathaned, and installed, and the tack-strip had to be nailed in place.  Sounds easy if you say it fast.

I didn’t stop moving at all (but for a BBQ) for the next few days.

Here we are, as good as it’s going to get, now ready for carpet.   I was told to pour vegetable oil down the floor drain and tape it off to prevent the p-trap from drying out over time and venting sewer gas.  Makes sense.

That is the “everything” moved out of the way.

The bedroom was straight forward.  It had been a while since I’d coped a joint, but it didn’t take long before I was getting results I was happy with (I don’t care if it’s a basement bedroom). That baseboard, incidentally, is re-purposed from the upstairs hallway, and I had about 2 linear feet of waste once I was finished.  Whew.

The two rolls of carpet staged in the laundry room.  Super convenient… unless you want to do anything in the laundry room, that is.  They weren’t there for long.

There it is installed.  Yay!!!

With the opportunity to empty my garage finally knocking at the door, I let it in… oh yeah.  Trip after trip, I kept wondering when I was going to peter out, because I’d been at it since 7:30 AM that day, and it was coming on 10 PM by the time I put my head down.

Somebody dropped some furniture in there before a picture even got taken.  Yeah, I wasn’t wasting any time.

Coming together now.  I really, really should have done the T-bar first, but like I said, this came on so quickly, I was still installing the underlay in the bedroom when they showed up.

It took a little while for me to figure out what to do with the new space at the bottom of the stairs, so we’ll try this for a bit.  I don’t like a rolling chair on carpet, but for now, it’s a start.  That electrical panel still needs a door, and there’s a light still needed at the bottom of the stairs.  It’s coming. Oh, and curtains. Cass has material for curtains.

On another note, the basement lighting has always been pathetic, and I wanted to change to dimable LED panels.  You can get 2 x 2’s that fit right into the T-bar, but they want over $100 a piece for them.  Dimable LED’s require a complicated power supply (that clips the top of the sine-wave instead of lessening the amplitude), and for now, the industry has taken to charging through the nose for it.  Put “green” on something, and it’s a license to gouge.

I know this because some years ago I built two generators from scratch, with no economies of scale, for right around $2/watt, when the industry average was around $6.  Intended to be used in a hydro application (Panama), anyway you can get it to turn, this brush-less generator is enough for a modest home, and will last for decades with only a bearing to replace now and then.

Aaaaaanyways…..   The final touch was replacing the T-bar, which makes a mess over everything no matter how careful you are.  In the attic of the garage was the box of spares, and I compared a new one to an old one.  All this time, I’ve wanted to paint them to freshen them up, but when I sat the two beside each other, there wasn’t a big enough difference to bother with it.   Heh, heh…  It actually looks a little cluttered.  LOL.

Last night, for the first time since we returned from Panama, Cass and I enjoyed a movie in the basement, only because it was hot out, and that is where it is cool and comfortable.  How nice it is to have the option again.