If you have been reading my articles over at the Home Blog, you know that we will be having carpet installed in our family room. (If you missed that article, you can click here to read it: Adventures in Carpeting.)
We came to the decision after some debate. Carpet will help insulate and warm up the floors (the family room is over a cold crawl space) and make it more comfortable. It is cheaper than installing hardwood floors. The current vinyl floor tiles are literally disintegrating and have become a safety hazard. Beside the risk of tripping over them and the occasional splinters we have been getting in our stockinged feet, there is the hazard that the baby may pull up and then ingest some of the crumbling pieces.
We saved some money by hitting the flooring place during a sale, saving $3 a square foot on the price. That will help.
Today, the store called to give us the final price of the carpet installed. I asked for a breakdown and found out that if we pull up the tile ourselves and remove the boot trim (which consists of one small piece), we would save $157! We could do the work in about a half hour, including moving all of the furniture out. Since we want to paint the room anyway, moving the furniture is not really any more labor than we planned. If you think about it, removing the old tile would be the equivalent of earning us $314 an hour! I don’t know about you, but that is more money than I think I will ever make in an hour.
It is just a recent example of how doing what you can do can really save money. We can make the carpet ourselves, and we would void the 20 year warranty if we installed it ourselves, but demoing the old stuff is easy.
Another way we are saving here is to ask the flooring store to have any large remnants bound for us. They will do this for free, and we will have two area rugs that will help protect the carpet by the doors.
Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
Related Articles:
Frugal Home Improvement: Make Your Doorknobs Glow
Habitat for Humanity HomeStore