Carpet goes in faster than any other floor — a typical three-bedroom is a single day — which is exactly why people are unprepared for it. It is over before you have worked out what you were supposed to do.
Here is the whole thing, in order.
The night before
Clear everything small yourself: anything on the floor of a closet, anything on a shelf that could be knocked, lamps, cables, the contents of under-the-bed storage. Crews will move furniture, but they will not sort your closet, and closets are the part everyone forgets.
Take down anything hanging on a wall that could fall when doors are opening and heavy rolls are coming past. Pull curtains up off the floor.
If you have pets, plan where they are going to be. The doors will be open for hours, there will be knives and tack strip on the floor, and a stressed cat behind a wall of stacked furniture is a bad afternoon for everyone.
Confirm in advance who is moving the large furniture — it should have been a line on the quote, and it is one of the items worth checking before you compare bids.
Out with the old
Old carpet is cut into strips and rolled, and the pad comes up after it. Both go out fast. This is the loudest and dustiest part of the day, and it is also the moment when the subfloor becomes visible for the first time in years.
Expect a smell. Whatever has soaked into an old pad over a decade is released when it comes up, and pet accidents in particular announce themselves. If the subfloor underneath is stained, say something rather than letting it get covered — it can be sealed, and sealing it is far cheaper now than after the new carpet is down.
The old carpet and pad are debris and someone has to pay to dispose of them. That should be on the quote too.
Tack strip, subfloor, and the boring part that matters
Tack strip is the thin wooden strip with angled pins that runs around the perimeter and grips the carpet's backing. Old strip is replaced rather than reused when it is corroded or when the new carpet has a different backing.
This is also when squeaks get fixed. A squeak is almost always subfloor moving against a joist or a nail, and the five minutes it takes to drive a few screws while the floor is bare is the cheapest that repair will ever be. Once carpet is down, fixing it means taking carpet back up.
Ask the crew to walk the room and listen before the pad goes down. It is a reasonable request and any installer will do it.
Pad, then carpet, then seams
The pad is stapled or glued down and butted tight. Pad quality is a genuine spec, not a formality — it carries most of the underfoot feel, and it does a large share of the work of keeping the carpet alive. It is also the thing most often quietly downgraded on a cheap bid.
Then the carpet goes in, and seams get made where the roll is not wide enough to cover a room in one piece. Standard broadloom carpet comes in twelve-foot widths, so any room wider than twelve feet has at least one seam. This is normal and not a defect.
What you can influence is where the seam lands. Away from the main walking path, running with the light rather than across it, and not through a doorway you look down. Say this before the carpet is cut, not after — a good installer will already be planning it, and will happily talk it through.
You will be able to find a seam if you look for it. In a low-pile or looped carpet you may see it slightly even when you are not looking. Plush and textured piles hide seams better. If invisible seams matter to you, that is a factor when choosing the carpet in the first place.
Stretching: the step that decides how it looks in two years
This is the one to care about. Carpet has to be stretched tight across the room and hooked onto the tack strip under real tension.
The proper tool is a power stretcher — a long, braced device that works off the opposite wall and pulls the carpet across the whole room. The quick alternative is a knee kicker, which an installer bumps with their knee, and which cannot generate anything close to the same tension over any distance.
Carpet installed with a knee kicker alone looks perfect on day one. Eighteen months later it relaxes and you get ripples and waves across the middle of the room, and fixing that means pulling it up and restretching it. It is the single most common carpet complaint there is, and it is entirely an installation issue.
You do not need to supervise. Just ask, when you book: will this be power stretched? The answer tells you a lot about who you have hired.
Doors, thresholds, and the last hour
New carpet plus new pad is frequently thicker than what came out, and interior doors that used to swing clear may now catch. Trimming the bottom of a door is straightforward, but somebody has to do it — check whether that is included.
At doorways the carpet is finished into a transition: a metal or wood strip where it meets tile or wood, and a seam binder where it meets other carpet. These are the same transition pieces that show up on any flooring job.
Then the offcuts go, the room gets vacuumed, and the furniture comes back.
The first week
You can walk on it immediately. There is no cure time.
There will be a smell for a few days as the new carpet and pad off-gas. It is normal and it fades. Open windows, run the fans, and give it air — in Orange County that is easy for most of the year.
You will also get shedding. New cut-pile carpet releases loose fibers for the first several weeks and it can look alarming in a vacuum canister. It stops.
Vacuum it in the first week rather than waiting. It does not damage new carpet and it clears the loose fiber faster.
The walkthrough
Before the crew leaves, walk every room with them. Look along the seams, look at the perimeter for any place the carpet is not fully hooked, check inside closets and behind doors, and look at the transitions at each doorway.
Point at anything you are not happy with while they are still there with their tools. That is what the walkthrough is for, and on our jobs the work is not finished until you say it is.
If you are still choosing, our carpet service page covers the options and the free in-home estimate brings samples to your house — which for carpet matters more than most, because color and pile read completely differently in a bedroom than under showroom lights.
Thinking about carpet?
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