LESLIE: Alright. Todd in Florida, you’ve got The Money Pit. How can we help you today?
TODD: Hey. Thanks for taking my call. I have a living room in our house that we’d like to use as a home office; we spend a lot of time there.
TOM: (overlapping voices) OK.
TODD: And we’re going to put new carpet in; it needs new carpet. We’ll probably expect to be in the house for about a year before we sell it. One of the things that I don’t want to do is have this brand-new carpet in our living room and then put office furniture on it. And heavy office furniture leaves those little shapes; you know, the corners and the circles and stuff that it will?
TOM: Sure.
TODD: So my question is, is there a kind of carpet you can recommend or a pad or something that will help me minimize those spots or maybe something I do to the furniture itself that will minimize those spots?
TOM: Well, I would think a Berber carpet or something that’s a very low pile because they have carpet for offices; it’s a commercial-grade carpet. It’s always very low pile. And the second thing is, probably the area of the home office that gets the most use is, of course, the chair running under the desk. And for there, you really need to have a pad down on the floor; one of those chair/glider pads that sticks to the …
TODD: Oh, those – the clear, plastic things?
TOM: Clear, plastic ones, right. And just keep the chair on that and that will, you know, help you quite a bit from stretching out the carpet, which is another thing that happens, as well as wearing it out in that space.
LESLIE: Yeah. And when you’re choosing your carpet, you don’t – anything that has the word “pile” in it, you don’t want because a pile is when they take the loop and they cut it so it’s like an open, almost – traditionally, you would think of it as a shag but you can get the pile in super-short or long, depending on the look you want. So you want something that’s looped; you want a closed loop.
TODD: If we have those spots in the carpet already, is there anything we can do to take them up? Do you brush them? Do you vacuum – yeah, obviously, vacuuming.
TOM: Have you already put the carpet down and started the process?
TODD: No, no, no.
TOM: OK.
TODD: This is the just the old carpet we have now; I was curious if I could replace what we have now, which is a real short – unfortunately, it’s a pile carpet but if there’s a way to kind of compromise.
TOM: (overlapping voices) Yeah.
LESLIE: (overlapping voices) Pile. You need an extended period of time on your hands but (Leslie and Todd chuckle) we have a coffee table that just indents our rug crazily and I like to move it quite often. So, the trick is you need a very high-powered vacuum and a fork and a couple of hours on your hand. (Todd chuckles)
I generally take a dinner fork and we’ll just sort of get in there and lift up all of the pile and sort of poke, poke, poke, poke, poke and then vacuum and then poke, poke, poke. It works; it just takes a while.
TODD: So what you’re recommending is hardwood. (Leslie chuckles)
TOM: (overlapping voices) Yes. Or laminate.
LESLIE: (overlapping voices) Laminate.
TOM: Or laminate.
TODD: Or laminate.
TOM: Yeah.
TODD: Alright. Well, thank you very much.
TOM: You’re very welcome, Todd. Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT.
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