John Lewis carpets

[Participant]

Hi all

We have a room to re-carpet. It's the first time I've ever paid for carpet and I'm after some advice please.

The room is a living room measuring 6m x 4m. We've contacted a few local places and they have all without exception been completely useless, ranging from missing appointments to over-measuring to being uncommunicative to the extent that we thought they'd taken a personal dislike to us.

Anyway we then thought why not bend over for the big J again, since they always seem to do things pretty well (for a price).

So they've quoted us £860 for 42Oz 80% wool carpet at £24 psqm, 'multilux' underlay at £9.50 psqm, fitting at £3.50 pswm, and £20 for two new threshold bars. The quality of service from the guy quoting was outstanding I've got to say. He stayed explaining all the options and potential issues with each option. Very good.

My questions are:

1. Is this an astronomical rip off?
2. Are John Lewis any good at this sort of thing?
3. What's the underlay like? Recommended for a living room? Tradepriced reckons its commercial name is Duralay Kensington Deluxe, which is felt over rubber crumb.

I want it to be super luxurious, the guy recommended the multilux for good thermal properties and comfort, but also being firm enough to stop furniture marks causing too many problems.

I wanted to buy and fit it myself but my wife reckons they'll be funny about that, and potentially try and blame any fitting problems on the underlay.

4. Is 42Oz enough, or should we go for 50Oz?
5. The guy recommended first lining our floor with paper to stop dust coming up through the floorboards. It's a 1960 suspended ground floor. Total cost for this was only a tenner - no-brainer?

Many thanks.

 

[Rroff]

Know nothing about carpets other than good ones ain't cheap - was quoted a bit over £400 for what was generic quality for a slightly smaller room so doesn't sound bad for a luxurious carpet.

 

[Bickaxe]

I'll check when I'm back at work Tuesday but I think you're paying for the John Lewis name too.

 

[Maccapacca]

You'll also be paying for John Lewis customer service which is excellent.

 

[R B Customs]

all of those m2 prices you have stated (assuming they're inc VAT?) are a little high... but they're from JL so that's to be expected. If you think it's a good price then that's fine really - but you can do a lot better if you want to.

I've recently paid £3.50/m2 (whole 15m2 roll delivered for £52.50 - it used to be cheaper) for cloud9 cumulus 11mm underlay (considered one of the best, but rubber crumb underlays are specced for some carpets / situations - a carpet fitter would give the best advice really)

I pay a local carpet fitter about £3/m2 for fitting and grippers. He knows I order my carpets online and knows he's not going to be needed to supply them but has supplied underlay in the past. If you find a local independent carpet fitter and are upfront with them that you've already sources the materials then it can work quite effectively.

I've recently bought 4x4 kingsmead pure wool stripe carpet for £11.49 /m2 from allfloorsexpress (list price is around £32/m2 - my local 'factory outlet has it for that price off the roll!)


http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18638662
This is quite a good thread, I posted post #2 in that thread and there's some decent advice there which I needn't repeat.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/gds/Your-Guide-to-Buying-Carpet-Underlay-/10000000177320213/g.html
That's a fairly decent guide to underlay (and why rubber crumb is sometimes advised)

 

[Participant]

Cheers guys, we went into JL today and placed an order. Completely understand that we could get more vfm using other tactics, but we decided that the customer service / guarantee was important to us in this instance so decided to stick to JL.

What we did change though was the underlay. I asked to try their underlays again and asked what their most luxurious one was, they brought out a 42Oz carpet panel and a large sample of what they call 'red supreme', which is Tradaire's Colours Red underlay, a 135lb rubber waffle:

I took my shoes off and had a step on it...it was incredibly good and easily twice as comfortable as the one I posted in the OP. It made me go 'yuuuuuuh', so we swapped to that for an extra £20 . How practical it ends up being remains to be seen, but ermergerd it's comfy.