Laying Carpet Tiles in my workshop

I have just got myself a brand new outside workshop/shed. Before I started putting furniture inside I decided that I needed to put some kind of carpet down. To get a fitted carpet seemed a little expensive, especially for an outside workshop. Also I couldn’t find a single piece of carpet large enough (had to be about 11ft by 10ft). So I went for carpet tiles. Calculated that I needed 39/40 tiles at 50cm x 50cm, purchased 40 to be on safe side.

Since I had never laid carpet tiles before, I did some research and found a short video somewhere.

First recommendation from the video was to start laying the tiles from the centre, rather than from one of the corners. This made sense when I thought about it – if a corner was slightly off being a perfect right angle, then problems could develop further down the line.

First task then was to find centre of floor. The video recommended using a chalked piece of string – i.e. tie string from corner to corner, flip string to leave chalk mark, do same for other diagonal, check by stretching string between middle of each side. Being slightly lazy I made do without chalked string – just used straight edges, pencil and tape measure to find centre of room. The video also suggested using special double-sided sticky patches for use with tiles. I could not find any of these so I just went for a roll of double-sided sticky tape for use with carpets.

Before I actually started laying the carpet tiles I thoroughly vacuumed the floor. If the floor had been a lot older I would have given it a good clean as well. I cut off my first piece of double-sided tape, using no particular size, but making it about 4 to 5 inches long I suppose. Now I stuck the corners of my first 4 tiles down and I was away.

I will not go into further details of my progress to the conclusion of my tile-laying. I will just give a few tips below for anyone who has the same, or a similar, task to complete.

  1. Make sure you get a really good sharp knife for the cutting of tiles.
  2. Be aware that 5 metres of sticky tape may not be quite enough if your workshop or shed is as big as mine!
  3. Once you get to the stage of needing to cut tiles to fit round the edge, prepare a line of tiles before starting to stick them down.

Laying Carpet Tiles is a simple enough job I suppose, but there is great satisfaction when it is successfully finished.

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