Well, the holidays are over, the work is (for the most part in my area) spotty at best, and we have a new president coming into office. Changes are coming (inevitably), including your New Year’s resolution. Do you have one yet? Here’s one I came up with after viewing the photos for this article. May we all resolve to do a better job regardless of the task at hand! Because your work is your signature and the quality of your work is the calling card. Remember all those one-liners your parents or mentors taught you, like “Your Word is Your Bond” and “Any Job Worth Doing is Worth Doing Right”? The older I get the more I seem to use those one-liners. So in the spirit of “Quality Work” in mind, let’s practice our powers of observation and take a look at a couple installations, playing a well-known game in my house, twenty questions. And we’ll see if “You Make the Call.”

Is Photo 1 from a residential or commercial job site? Is there a problem with the carpet raveling at the edges? Would you have done something different from the installation side to minimize the appearance of the fraying carpet edge? Does this appear to be a high-traffic area?

Photos 2, 2a and 3 are the same installation, just different areas, tile and carpet. But the same questions should be asked here as well. Also, should the maintenance personnel cut the ends of yarn off flush with the carpet or try to vacuum them up? Will the loops or frayed yarn ever stop coming out? Maybe there is something wrong with this carpet? Ok, I’m being a little sarcastic but I’m at a loss for words here.

Photo 4 shows another area but with the addition of? Wait just a minute, I think I see…yep, looks like seam sealer to me.

Photo 5 sure looks like seam sealer or could that just be full-spread adhesive oozing up on both the tile and carpet? Photo 5a is a close-up. “You Make the Call.”

Photo 6 is what has happened and what will eventually happen to every edge where the carpet meets the tile. You can see that the exposed edge of the tile is all chipped up from the sweeper banging into it. You can also see the missing yarn all the way down to the primary backing. And just to be sure we are on the same page, this is a commercial glue direct, three-year-old job.

So what happened to the transitioning from carpet to tile? I see where the tile stopped and the carpet begins but again where is the transition? There is no metal edge on the tile. There is no T molding or transition strip used anywhere on this job! The tile guys did not communicate with the carpet guys and/or the G.C. did not know enough about flooring to question the installation company. Either way this is wrong. And for clarity, Photos 4, 5 and 5a shows seam sealer used after the end user complained about the beginning stages of the carpet fraying at the tile juncture. I say juncture because this is not to be considered a transition.

Photo 7 should interest all of us; it’s smack dab in the middle of a long hallway in a commercial glue direct installation. But something is amiss here, the colors off a bit? No, that’s not it.

Photo 7a shows a close-up and the color looks great. The carpet is off pattern, shifted to the left 1/8th to 3/16 of an inch but who was the drunken sailor that cut this? And if you were short rug, why mis-match the pattern in the middle of the hall? Put it at the end of the corridor, making some effort to hide it. The lesson here…here’s how not to do it! Have a great day and thanks again for reading “You Make the Call.”