Carpets

[Thewards]

Can anyone help us on this?  We have a granite village house in Brittany and renovations are complete upstairs and getting there on the ground floor.  We have got to the stage of thinking about flooring and are having downstairs tiled.  We were going to carpet the upstairs bedrooms and landing but both our builder and our neighbours have advised us not to have carpets, saying wooden flooring is better - I think because of damp.

The floorboards aren't in a fantastic condition so this would mean laying wooden flooring but really I wanted carpets as this will make the house more cosy in winter.  There is a local carpet shop in St Brieuc so people do buy carpets in the area.  Does anyone have experience of this issue.  I suppose I can ask in the carpet shop but they will probably be keen to sell me a carpet and my builder is keen to lay the wooden flooring!

Any independent advice welcome - do carpets get damp in granite houses?

[Roli]

I don’t know about damp but if you do decide on carpet I would strongly recommend you use a UK fitter!!

The fitters I used here said all carpet had to be glued, I had spent weeks trying to remove the glue left behind from the carpets I had scraped up. They had never heard of grippers, they had no knee kicker thingy? In one room they put the joint in the worst possible place, when there was no need as the amount of carpet had been well over estimated they put joints in the stair carpet, one straight down the middle of a step and at most of the walls there are gaps of between 1 and 2 centimetres where you can see the bare floor. I complained of course, but they just refused to accept that there was anything wrong.

I don't know if I am allowed to give names but I will gladly tell you who not to use.

Roli

 

[Alcazar]

Recently renovated (full-on decorated) an upstairs bedroom in an old stone built house in southern Haute Vienne. (pladtered walls, exposed beams in the walls, etc).

It had a carpet, which we cut into strips and removed (luckily it wasn't glued), as it was foam backed and the foam had turned into dust.

When we got it up, we could see why it had been carpeted, whereas the other bedroom is floored with chestnut. The floor boards were in a right state, uneven, loose and some had been levelled using levelling compound.

My local scierie owner came out to advise. My options were: floating floor, (like laminate), new floorboards in chestnut, or another carpet after making good.

His advice was to go with the carpet: he told me that a floating floor would be no end of a problem with the uneven floorboards, and that I'd be better off spending £100 or so on a cheap carpet now, and redoing the floorboards later when I have more time, more available cash and no other jobs needing done!

I bought a cheap carpet from Briconauts, (20 sq m for around £120) and fitted it myself with a decent pair of kitchen scissors and a  stanley knife with a new blade. Took me a couple of hours, but the jobs a good'un as they say.

Alcazar