How Often Should You Do Carpet Re-stretching (Atlanta) and Why?

Chris Kiadii - MTC, UFT, RRT, CCT, OCT, RCT, CRT, SMT, JTC

9 years ago

Carpet Repair Atlanta - BEFORE Restretching

Wrinkly Carpet -Before Our Professional Restretching Services

Carpets are wonderful features to have in your home. They offer a number of benefits:

Carpets add to the decor in a room (and help tie in the design elements within the space),
they make walking across the floors comfortable,
and they help muffle sounds from footfalls so that noise can be reduced within the home.

Once you have your carpet installed in your property, you may think that that’s all there is to it—that you won’t have to do anything to it anymore, except for the occasional cleaning. However, as time passes, you may notice things about your carpet that need to be addressed immediately.

The appearance of rolls, ripples or bunches

After years of foot traffic, your carpet will begin exhibiting signs of wear and tear. Carpets can become loose, especially if they spread out across several rooms.

The elasticity that you observed in a new carpet will no longer be there; instead, the carpet will begin showing bunches, rolls and ripples in certain areas. They may look harmless, but you’ll unfortunately discover soon enough that these waves can be quite unsightly, and they can also be pretty nasty tripping hazards.

Restretching our client’s carpet with a professional stretcher.

Finding a solution

If you notice your carpet beginning to loosen up and causing people to trip all over the place, you have to take action soon. Correcting the loose carpet will keep your family safe from accidents and will help restore the appearance of your space.

Re-stretching a carpet entails pulling the slack out of an old carpet so that it will lie flat against the floor once again. Any excess material after the re-stretching will be trimmed away, and the carpet will be tacked back into place.

Carpet re-stretching technicians will make use of specific tools to get the job done. A slotted blade knife is used to separate the flooring around the edges so they can be pulled. To separate the pile from the tack strip, an awl and hammer would be handy. A power stretcher, perhaps the most essential tool, does the heavy stretching (human hands won’t be able to pull as much as the equipment can); there is also a smaller version called the knee stretcher or kicker that can be used to finish the stretching job. And industrial staple guns are excellent for securing the flooring back down afterwards.

How often should re-stretching be done?

If your carpet was perfectly installed when you moved into the house, you won’t have to think about re-stretching it for another five years. That’s because a good carpet installation job would stay in place for three to five years, so getting experts to perform the re-stretching too early or often would only be a waste of effort and resources.

In some cases, you may not need your carpet replaced at all. Here are a few customer testimonials.

Professional in every way

Had Chris re-stretch a room which had improperly installed carpet. Everything from the first phone call to the finish job was first rate. He kept me informed as to his schedule, arrived exactly on time and provided good service at a good price. Will call him again if other carpet needs come up.

Clean and repair

I used Fresh Start to clean and repair a Karastan carpet. They did an excellent job-I would highly recommend them.