New carpet in the living room

New carpet for the living room

Connie decided that we needed new carpet for the living room.  After agonizing over the color and design she finally made her decision.  The salesman asked me what I thought about the carpet.  I told him, “I have no dog in this fight”.  I think he understood.

  We scheduled an appointment for a fellow to come and take the carpet measurements. I tried to tell the salesman the room was 12’ X 20”.  He paid no attention to me and scheduled an appointment for the measurement.  The fellow doing the   measurements arrived within 10 minutes of the appointed time of 12:30 and apologized for being late.  What??  My only concern that he did not have a tape measure or clip board.  Silly me.

  The guy had only an I-Pad.  I decided that I had better stick around just in case he needed any consultation or supervision.  The first thing he did was to take a picture of every stick of furniture in the living room.  Of course, I asked why he needed pictures.  I had visions of a gang of robbers breaking in and stealing our expensive Walmart furniture.  He told me that he needed that in order to tell the installer how many people he needed to move the furniture out of the way for the installer.  OH.

  Then he placed the I-pad against the 20’ wall and shot a laser at the other end of the wall.  Then he did the same with the 12’ wall.  Then he shot a beam along the hypotenuse of both corners.  I know from woodworking that if those dimensions are within 1/16” the item is perfectly square.  No, I did not bother to ask.  I had figured out by now that he knew what he was doing.  He even measured the size and location of the AC registers.

  Then he showed me a computer layout of the room.  It had the size and shape of every piece of furniture plus their exact location in the room.  The dimensions of everything in the room were within a few mm of the exact size.  It even had the estimated weight of each item.  By then I figured out that he had the situation under control.

  My last question was how long it would take for the carpet to be cut locally.  He said that they sent the computer file to a company in Michigan where the carpet was cut using the computer layout.  It was cut there and then shipped by truck back to Naples.  He had no control of the lag time.  He told me that the carpet would be rolled in the 12’ direction to minimize the space used in the truck.  The tack strips would be cut to length and rolled up inside the carpet roll.  The threshold strip between the kitchen and living room was cut to the exact length and the difference between the carpet-hardwood floor was determined to get the exact threshold pattern.

  When he left Connie asked him how many floors he had measured today.  He said that he had completed seven and had one more to go and then he would hit his pool.  We live in a pretty advanced world.