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Rant: please stop stretching carpet over tack strip that's already got staples poking through it
I pulled up a 12x15 berber in a rental over on Delmar last Tuesday and found four rows of tack strip with old staples sticking up like thumbtacks, glued right over the previous installer's work instead of being replaced. Whoever laid that down just ran new carpet over the mess, and I know because the seam tape underneath was a totally different color and the staples were rusted into the wood. Here's why this bugs me so much: every staple head shreds the backing as the carpet flexes, and six months later the customer calls YOU because the room's rippling and they think you did it. I've seen it three times this month alone, and one of those jobs the homeowner had paid $1,100 for the install not even eight months prior. Just yank the old strip, scrape the concrete, and tack down fresh stuff. It costs you twenty minutes and about $30 in materials. Is anybody else running into this on turnover jobs, or is it just the cheap rental market in my area?
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noahchen3d ago
Man, come on, pulling tack strip on every turnover job? Half these rentals, the strip is still solid and the staples are surface rust at worst. I've run carpet over strip that had a few old staples in it plenty of times and never had a callback, so the rippling thing sounds more like a stretch problem than a staple problem. Plus on a concrete slab you start scraping and chipping and now you're patching concrete, which is way more than twenty minutes and thirty bucks. Sometimes the smart play is just tap the staple heads flat with a hammer and move on. Your mileage may vary depending on how bad it actually is.
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