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Pet Ripped Your Carpet? How You Can Repair It In Minutes.

By Fred Terlaak

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 25Aug2009 Word count: 616 Viewed: 298 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

One of the interesting things I learned building a multi-city carpet cleaning company is that every city has its own way of doing things.

But one thing that is common to all of our apartment carpet cleaning operations is that they routinely request carpet patches or bonded inserts. These patches are frequently required to repair pet damage caused by clawing around doors and transitions. If a stain won't come out with cleaning or chemical treatment, the customer may also request a patch.

Patching requires knowledge, judgment, and skill. If the carpet area requiring the patch is heavily worn, it may be difficult to match the donor piece and the patch will stick out like a sore thumb. There are ways around this, but we'll leave those to the professionals.

Also, you probably want to avoid putting a patch in a traffic area. Any time you cut the backing of the carpet, you take a chance of creating a weak spot that can come lose with wear. That is why many seams become visible over time due and as it wears.

Patching in concept is very simple. You cut the carpet backing with a very sharp razor blade between the rows of fibers. You then match a donor piece from a discrete place like a corner in a hall closet. Using seaming tape and glue the donor piece is permanently bonded in place.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? In concept, a lot of things are easy, but in practice it's frequently more difficult to execute. The same is true for patching. Here are the steps in detail:

Cutting the backing - Make sure that the patch is slightly larger than the damaged area. Part the fibers with a pointed object such as an awl. Cut down this channel that you've created, but cut closer to donor side of the row to insure that the fibers on the surrounding area remain intact. If you lose too many fibers from either the donor or the surrounding area, you will see the patch when you're finished.

The donor piece - Once all four sides of the backing have been cut, immediately mark one side of the backing with an arrow indicating the direction of the carpet. Yes, carpet is laid in a specific direction and if you do not match the direction of the fibers, you will be disappointed with the results.

Now go to the closet or find a remnant, and cut a piece that exactly matches the damaged piece - matching the direction. Don't worry; your carpet was laid in the same direction throughout your home. By looking at the arrow you placed on the damaged piece, you can see how to position it over the donor piece before you cut it out.

Gluing the donor in piece in place - Cut four over-lapping strips of seam tape and carefully position them inside the hole. Using a glue gun, tack down the tape to the surrounding carpet. Now place the donor piece inside the hole and carefully match the edges using a carpet roller.

Does the patch look like its part of the surrounding carpet? If it sticks out, try refitting or trimming the pieces until it matches exactly. Now you can glue the donor piece in place starting in one corner and working in one direction. Make sure that you use the carpet roller to push the glue into the holes in the carpet backing.

This is in essence how we teach our carpet cleaning technicians how to perform carpet patches. If you take your time, there is absolutely no reason why you can't do as good a job as experienced technicians who do 3 or 4 patches every day.

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