Gary RV_Wizard
Site Team
With help from good friend and fellow RVer Mike Wassing, I've been working for the past 10 days to replace all the carpeting in our triple slide, 40 ft coach. Though strictly an amateur, I have quite a bit of flooring experience in the stick house (though mostly tile and laminate) and so felt able to tackle this one on my own. The two of us put in 4.5 eight hour days to get the bulk of it done and I've since added another dozen man-hours on finishing touches. One of my conclusions is that the $2000-$2500 that RV flooring pros charge for this job is a reasonable price. That is labor only - your choice of carpet is extra. We spent $475 on a 12x20 piece of mid-grade of carpet, another $80 for 96 sq ft of top quality pad and about $100 on miscellaneous stuff, including edge binding for two pieces.
The 10 year old carpet was still in decent physical shape but had suffered badly from sun fade and discoloration where the inevitable spills had been cleaned up. Color-fastness was one of our major criteria in selecting the new carpet! Getting the old stuff out was a major chore in itself, involving the removal of captain chairs, the sofa and my computer desk plus about a zillion staples. We used the old pieces from the main floor and the largest slide as a template to cut the new pieces. Everything else we measured and cut from scratch. The new carpet is stapled in place like the old was. We used a Craftsman air-driven stapler and a portable compressor, almost a necessity for a task like this. It uses narrow crown staples and we mostly used the 3/4" length lus some 1" here and there where extra length was needed, e.g. where carpet is folded over on itself to form a blind edge.
I got a couple pieces back from the carpet binding shop yesterday and expect to get them installed today. The flush floor slide required one edge to be bound (the forward edge that slides across the main floor), and the entry step well cover piece required binding all the way around.
Here are some photos of the work in progress. Will add more photos when it is complete.
The 10 year old carpet was still in decent physical shape but had suffered badly from sun fade and discoloration where the inevitable spills had been cleaned up. Color-fastness was one of our major criteria in selecting the new carpet! Getting the old stuff out was a major chore in itself, involving the removal of captain chairs, the sofa and my computer desk plus about a zillion staples. We used the old pieces from the main floor and the largest slide as a template to cut the new pieces. Everything else we measured and cut from scratch. The new carpet is stapled in place like the old was. We used a Craftsman air-driven stapler and a portable compressor, almost a necessity for a task like this. It uses narrow crown staples and we mostly used the 3/4" length lus some 1" here and there where extra length was needed, e.g. where carpet is folded over on itself to form a blind edge.
I got a couple pieces back from the carpet binding shop yesterday and expect to get them installed today. The flush floor slide required one edge to be bound (the forward edge that slides across the main floor), and the entry step well cover piece required binding all the way around.
Here are some photos of the work in progress. Will add more photos when it is complete.