Carpet Fitters in Ipswich: Rooms, Stairs and Runners

Why choose carpet

• Warmth. Carpet and underlay insulate a floor, which you notice most over concrete and in older houses.
• Quiet. It absorbs footfall and airborne sound better than any hard floor. That matters upstairs, on stairs and in flats.
• Comfort and safety. Soft underfoot, and less slippery on stairs.
• Forgiving of subfloors. It hides minor unevenness that LVT or vinyl would show.

Carpet fibres

Pile styles

• Twist: tightly twisted cut pile. Hard-wearing and the all-round choice for most rooms and stairs.
• Saxony: deep, soft cut pile. Luxurious in bedrooms, shows footprints, less suited to stairs.
• Loop or berber: uncut loops with a textured, natural look. Durable, though claws can snag loops, so think twice with cats and dogs.
• Velvet: short, smooth and formal. Shows shading.
• Patterned and striped: woven or printed designs, popular on stairs and landings.

Underlay

Underlay does as much for a carpet as the carpet itself. It adds comfort, cuts noise, keeps heat in and helps the pile recover, so the carpet lasts longer. Old underlay is almost always replaced along with the carpet. Dense underlay suits stairs and busy rooms. Over underfloor heating, carpet and underlay together need a low enough tog rating for heat to pass through, commonly a combined 2.5 tog or less.

Stairs and landings

Stairs are the hardest-working carpet in the house and the most skilled part of the fitting. Choose a dense twist or a nylon blend over a firm underlay. Each tread is fitted separately or waterfalled over the nosing, with gripper at every step. Stair runners with exposed painted or timber edges are another option.

Stair and hallway runners

A runner is a strip of carpet fitted down the centre of a staircase or hallway, leaving painted or timber edges showing on each side. On stairs it gives grip and quiet without hiding good joinery. Runners are cut from broadloom carpet and bound or whipped along the edges, or supplied as woven runner carpet in a fixed width. They can be fitted with stair rods for a traditional finish. Striped and patterned designs are the usual choice, and a wool or wool-blend flatweave wears best.

Measuring and fitting

Carpet comes on rolls, commonly 4 and 5 metres wide. We measure each room, plan where any seam falls and which way the pile runs, and keep joins out of doorways and sight lines. On fitting day the old carpet comes up, gripper and underlay go down, and the new carpet is stretched on to the gripper and finished at each door with a threshold bar. Doors are trimmed if the new carpet is thicker.

Subfloors still matter. Loose or squeaking boards are fixed while the floor is bare. See floor preparation for larger problems, and how installation works for the overall process.

The right carpet for each room

Bedrooms suit soft saxony or a wool twist. Living rooms need a resilient twist. Halls, stairs and landings need the most durable carpet you can afford. We do not recommend carpet for kitchens or bathrooms. For those rooms see LVT or sheet vinyl. Our room-by-room guide compares carpet with hard floors for every room.

Carpet tiles

Carpet tiles are squares of hard-wearing carpet, usually 50 cm, with a heavy backing. They are laid with a tackifier so single tiles can be lifted and replaced. They suit home offices, playrooms, garden rooms, garages converted to gyms and rental properties.

Carpet questions