Have you noticed your carpet seeming loose or wrinkled in some places? You can skip replacing it by learning to do carpet stretching. These wrinkles are entirely fixable, and the carpet stretching process is much less expensive than completely recarpeting the room – only a couple hundred dollars. You can also do it yourself and avoid hiring a carpet company to do the work.

You’ll need a few tools to do a carpet stretching job. Most people just rent their tools for a few hours halfway through the project. This helps reduce costs, since renting the tools for the whole time would be much more expensive. Tools required include a power stretcher – the main tool that will do the labor for you, a knee kicker for corners where the power stretcher can’t reach, a pry bar, a carpet cutter, a stapler using 5/16 inch staples, a chisel and tin snips.

Step one requires you to pull up the carpet. It’s been attached to a tack strip, and will need to be gently pulled away from it. Otherwise, you could end up tearing it, and requiring an entirely new carpeting job. Once you’ve pulled the carpet away, it’s time to remove the staples in the pad. Then, pull up the pad. Getting the staples out of the pad before pulling it up keeps your carpet pad from tearing.

Once you’ve managed to get both the carpet and the pad up, it’s time to replace your tack strips. They come in four foot lengths in most cases. Use the tin snips to cut them back down to size. These come with two types of screws, meant either for wood or concrete floors. Choose the correct tack strips for your subflooring. Pull up the old tack strips with the pry bar and lay the new ones out around the room’s footprint. Be sure the teeth face the wall as you install your new tack strips. Otherwise, the carpet isn’t going to stay where you need it to.

Once you’ve put your tack strips in place, it’s time to trim the carpet pad. It needs to fit just barely inside the tack strips. Staple it down about every three inches near the tack strip and along the seams. Once the pad has been firmly secured, it’s time to resize the carpet. It will probably be larger than you need, due to the carpet stretching in high traffic areas. Cut off the excess using the carpet cutter, but leave at least three inches on a side. This will be cut off once you’ve got your carpet in place.

Start by placing the carpet on the floor and attaching three of the four sides to your tack strip. Mount the carpet stretcher between the carpet and the last wall, and use the stretcher to pull the carpet closer to the wall, removing the wrinkles. You’ll need to move the stretcher along the carpet and the wall to make sure that it’s evenly stretched. Once you reach the corners, push the carpet toward the room’s edges using the knee kicker. You should have successfully managed carpet stretching now. Attach it to the tack strip, then use your carpet cutter to remove all the excess. It should look almost as good as new!