Carpet! Help!

[columbusmomma]

We need to recarpet our stairway going up, the hallway, and 2 bedrooms. I want to use berber.The floors underneath aren't worth trying to redo so we need to go with new carpet before we put our house on the market. All these areas together are small, but I don't have any idea what the square footage would be. My questions are: how do I go about finding a place to get the carpet? How do I avoid being ripped off? Is it super pricey? It always seems that commercials make it seem so cheap and it's by the square yard.We would need it installed too. This is brand new territory. Any advice from anyone whose BTDT? Thanks so much!

[annekevdbroek]

Home Depot and Lowes are both pretty good on carpet.

I used to sell flooring for a living, long long ago. Anyhow, forget the square foot price. That's just to make it look cheap. It isn't tile. You can't buy a square foot of carpet. It comes in 12' wide or 15' wide rolls generally, and you will have a certain amount of waste and overage due to seeming to fit it to your space.

Any carpet store worth anything will send someone for free (Home Depot requires a fee, but you get a credit towards your purchase with it) to measure and look over what other work you need with the carpet (e.g. tack strips, transition pieces, tear out, moving furniture, pad etc.)

For the least amount of waste choose a nonpatterned carpet. Use something neutral in color. I am personally not a fan of Berber since it tends to unravel if snagged doesn't always roll over the stairedge looking very good. Buy decent quality pad. Decent (not great, but ok) carpet will run at least $20 per yard. Home Depot recently had a flat install rate of about $100 or so. I would never ever hire one of those "whole house for $500" places - you will junk quality carpet and a lousy install.

[columbusmomma]

Thanks so much for the extremely helpful reply! So overall, do you think a place like lowe's or home depot is better then a strictly carpet/flooring type of business??

[5gifts]

I had to recarpet our house we moved out of. I called a contractor I know - he also has rentals - asked for a recomendation of a guy that will do a good job (and everyone is desperate for work). I had the guy out - he would charge $200 for all labor, gave me exact measure of what I needed and recomended which warehouses to go look. I needed 100 yards - and found REALLY nice carpet for $4-5 per yard. There was also really cheap stuff. I was just limited to what they had at the moment and the size of the roll. So $500 for carpet & $200 install for livingroom, hallway, 3 bedrooms & closets.
We had berber while living there, but put regular in.

[annekevdbroek]

The prices at Lowes and Home Depot are good - and they have great sales. They contract with a carpet installer for the installation. I've had very good experiences with everythign installed by Home Depot and Lowes. We just had our basement carpet done about 2 months ago and it went great. (We've had other things done, like storm doors, etc.)

[columbusmomma]

One more question, should I expect a big price change for carpeting stairs? I was on the Lowe's website and there some good deals however nothing includes stairs and that is a seperate cost. I'm just wondering if you remember if it is a significant cost? Thanks!