Home Sweet Home

When I got up this morning, and looked over my huge TADID list, this project was not to be found, however I came across the part I needed and was in a spry mood and after living with the eyesore in the kitchen for 4 years I’d had enough.

When we bought this house, the previous owner was an excrement handyman.  Maybe it is more that he did work that he was willing to live with, but I’m not willing to live with it.  At some point he broke down the door from the garage to the interior of the house. My neighbor said he probably did it by pulling the car in too far, but who knows. It must have beens something along those lines because the door jamb had been broken in two and he just kinda stapled it back together.

You might ask, “you lived with this broken door for 4 years, what about security?” well… if someone has gotten into your garage, the flimsy quarter-inch of wood in the door jamb won’t stop someone from getting in the rest of the house if they want. Besides, that’s what security systems and guns are for.

Anyway, so I went ahead and replaced the door jamb and figured I’d document the process. Sadly I never took the before picture, but trust that it was pretty terrible.

Tools you will need for this project:

Razor knife: To cut caulking already on the old door jamb to prevent tearout of paint and drywall when removing. You don’t need anything this fancy unless you just want to look like a badass and spend more on replacement blades.

Pryboy (prybar): To pull off the old moulding and door jamb.

Whacker (Hammer): To whack the pryboy.

Smacker (Rubber mallet): To persuade the old door jamb out of its comfy home, and to coax the new door jamb to nestle in the newly vacated cozy nook. I’m linking a white mallet instead of the black one I actually have. You can see some black rubber scuff marks on the wall of the final pictures of this project and understand why there’s a discrepancy. I’m going to have to hit those black spots when I repaint that wall.

Medium-heavy duty caulk gun: Honestly, you don’t need a heavy duty one, but just don’t waste your money on one of the cheapy ones. If you go with the light duty cheap ones you’re just renting it. You’ll end up having to get a new one by the next project or two you use it on. Having too heavy duty of a caulking gun actually turned a bit disastrous for me in this project… more on this later.

Japanese pull saw : This is by far one of my favorite tools. Mine is Irwin brand but they don’t seem to be available but the one I linked is exactly the same. Pull saws cut on the back stroke, which makes it easier to control for fine details. The best things about this model saw is that the blades are super thin which allows them to be bent for flush cuts or using as an undercut saw for installing flooring, and they have small kerf. This type also has two cutting sides, the finer toothed side is for crosscutting (cutting across the grain of the wood) and the other side has larger teeth for ripping (cutting with the grain).  It is so versatile and efficient that I use it for literally all hand sawn parts in my projects. I can’t recommend it enough.

Shootey boy (nail gun), air straw (air hose), and flat metal balloon (pancake compressor) It also helps to have a thousand or so 1-1/2″ brad nails. You certainly won’t need 1,000 nails, or 1-1/2″ long ones but that’s just how they sell them. They are cheap though so no big deal and the length is good for general use on other projects such as replacing a floor (baseboard and show moulding) and general woodworkery.

Drill boy: Corded drills have more power for the price and to drive the 3″ long screws we’ll be using you’ll need a good bit of oomph. If you have a high voltage lithium cordless drill, use that by all means king DIY.

Cutteyboy: Some kind of jigsaw or vibrating saw to cut the holes and reliefs for the striker plates. See what I used below for a laugh.

3″ construction screws: Just to screw with the next guy who has to fix the door, well use these special-bit screws along with the phillips heads that come with the lock plates.

Optional screw extractor kit: This could be a lifesaver and certainly a time saver.

As for parts, you’ll need to physically go to the local big box store and grab a door jamb if they have one.   One of the reasons I hadn’t done this projects years ago was that the local places only sold the whole door pack, not just a single jamb.  I came across it and bought it on the spot. The one I got is by “Door Shop.”  Now we can talk again about security. If you want a bit more security (an attacker would need maybe a few kicks to bring down the door instead of just one) You can get a door jamb reinforcement kit. I’ve had luck with these in my last house where the previous owner had kicked in the door and I was too inexperienced to replace the entire jamb (which again wouldn’t have been any more secure). Another time I had *thought* I locked myself out of the house in my pajamas while doing a deep clean of the cat boxes. I had to break into my garage and kick in the garage door only to find out that the front door wasn’t in fact locked at all.  I fixed the garage door with just a metal reinforcement kit and made damn sure not to walk outside the house for any reason without my keys in my pocket.  These kits use a hefty steel plate on the jamb near the lock as well as on the hinges and work great.  Honestly thought, with those kits the door itself will break before the jambs or hinges do. Doors are typically made of moulded semi-hollow MDF or in the case of most “steel” doors, they are  this shell of metal with a core of foam with wood just at the hinge and knob attachment points.

Anyway, I’m rambling. I got a damn door jamb. you’ll need some moulding too most likely. I needed it because mine was broke before I started working on it, but in the past, I had to buy new moulding because I broke it when i took off the old stuff and couldn’t reuse it.  Don’t be like me and get something that looks “close enough”.  Actually take a piece from the house to the store and match it exactly if you can.

The first step in the project is to score and cut the caulk from the old door jamb. This may be hard to see if it had been painted over, the whole door can look like one single piece of wood. It is in fact just 2 pieces of moulding and the jamb.  The trick to finding where to score is to look at what sits on top of the wallboard.  That plane is basically where the jamb is and anything proud of that is moulding. Score the moulding where it meets the wall pretty deeply with the blade angled so that it goes between the moulding and the wall like what is shown. Then hit it from the other side as well.

Exterior moulding follows the same rules. Just score by the wall and then on the jamb at the connection of the jamb and moulding.  Don’t forget to score the top miter joint of the moulding and bottom of the moulding as well.

Once you’ve got a little space, slide the flat part of the prybar behind the moulding and smack it with the whacker (hammer) to push it deeper. Once in about 1 to 1.5 inches, pry a bit to loosen the brads that hold the moulding on. Be careful on wall board not to pry so much you crush the gypsum.

Do this for both sides of the door and gently rip the moulding off completely. You’ll likely break one of these, so I just buy a 7-foot section of door casement while I’m at the store.

Remove any screws in the old door jamb.  Luckily, the previous owner chose random length screws ( like he found them in the trash or something, no two were alike) and they were all stripped out. I say “luckily” because I found out that if you strip a phillips head screw enough it can sometimes become a square head screw. Chuck one of those in the old drill and pull the screws out. If they are too stripped for this, use your screw extractor kit.

Once you remove all the screws (did you take off the striker plate for the lock and deadbolt?  or the door hinges if you’re working on that side? Score the bottom caulk where the door jamb meets the threshold sill. Then use a combination of the prybar to pull the jamb away from the wall joist and the smacker (rubber mallet) to nudge the jamb out of the way.

Once that’s done you can measure the two key lengths of the jamb. The total length and then the length of the relief for the jamb cut on both ends (so it could be either thehinge or the lock side) so make doubly– triply sure that you are cutting the correct side and cross cut the total length you measured from the original jamb. Line up the two jambs with the bottoms level with each other and transfer the measurements from the old one onto the new one.

Note the use of the finer teeth on the saw when cross cutting. This gives you a cleaner cut instead of tearing the wood fibers.

Then you can cut the relief.  Even though this is technically ripping the board to a degree, I’m using the finer teeth of the saw for a cleaner finish on the cut.

Then squeeze this top part into the door frame and use the smacker to nudge the bottom in alignment. Note that the bottom of the old jamb might have been supercaulked, so be sure to clean it out first should you need to. Super important! Stand outside and close the door to make sure the weather stripping engages… otherwise you’re going to have a bad time like I did.  If you can see light in the crack between the door and the jamb, then smack it a couple more times to seat it well before moving to the next step!

Once this is in place, it should seat tightly at the top. use your fingers to pull back the weatherstripping and add a few 3″ screws so that when the weatherstripping is back in place it hides the screw heads.

You can now cut the recesses for the lock strikers for the handle and deadbolt. The deadbolt is easiest because its a simple hole with no recess. For measurements, just close the door and mark with a pen where the actual bolt touches.

The next step is to cut the square hole. For this I used a combination of a drill hole and a junior-engineering-design-project add-on for my dremel that turns it into a jigsaw. You can do it a variety of ways however. I honestly recommend a vibration saw with a modified blade. I’d probably just cut the blade smaller with a hacksaw so it would be the right size.

After you’ve sawn the hole for the deadbolt, center your striker plate and drill in the screws and drill Just have mercy on the little guy in the wall…

The striker for the door handle is trickier because it is actually embedded into the frame. They sell nice little router templates for this kind of thing but honestly, you can cut it just about any way you see fit. It doesn’t have to look all that pretty either since the metal will cover up and Freddy Kreuger-faced destruction to the wood. Just make sure not to go too deep or too big.  I used the dremel with the router height adjustment base, but you can just use a sharp chisel if that’s all you got handy.

Once the strikers are in place, you need to put the casement back on the edges. This meets the wall on either side of the door. In my case, I had carefully removed my casement from the exterior part of the door (which is usually thicker and hardier than interior ones), but the interior needed replacing. Just go ahead and grab a 7-foot interior casement moulding at the home store when you buy the jamb because you’ll likely break the interior ones as they are pretty flimsy.

Cut your door casing pieces to length and miter (cut the ) end at 45 degrees to match the top moulding piece. You could measure this but just buy a miter box and save yourself some trouble.  Pull out the shootey boy (nail gun)and tack it with a handful of brads up the length. I always start tacking it at the top so the miter aligns best.

When done with both sides of the moulding, you can need to caulk the cracks on either side of each piece of moulding as well as the top. Now most people drag the caulk gun and deposit the caulk in a trailing fashion, but this is all wrong. Doing it this way leads to globs of caulk in places that need to be smoothed out (usually with your finger, which is also the wrong thing to do…). But worse, it causes weak caulking joints. You only get a thin skin of caulk over the crack you’re trying to fill which doesn’t insulate or hold up well over time.

The correct way to use caulk is to shoot it in front of the caulk gun and move in the direction you are firing it. This crams the caulk into the crack you’re trying to fill as well as leaving a nice finish. You can clean up any remainder with a damp paper towel. (Don’t use your fingers unless you wear a glove. You might think “it’s just caulk” but there’s a lot of nasty chemicals in home supplies that can cause all sorts of organ dysfunctions. Be safe and just use a glove or finger condom.) Check the video below to see the correct way to caulk.

Note: I’ve dun goofed a couple times in the video. First, I’m using clear caulk which when dried looks like someone wiped snot all over the door. I had to go back and sand it all off the exterior and wall and redo it with the right stuff. I should be using this brand or preferably this white caulk. Secondly, you can see the tube is all taped up with white duct tape.  With my vigor in finishing the job, I poked only one pinhole in the tip of the caulk tube after slicing the tip. This led to my new heavy-duty caulk gun putting too much pressure too quickly on the tube.  the tube itself split about 1.5 inches on the top facing me and spurted goo all over the place. This is why you should always wear safety goggles… also keep your mouth closed when you’re doing stuff like this.

 

We have had a few instances of having to deal with pet odors. I finally came up with the holy grail of killing pet odors from flooring. I’ll warn you, it’s not easy, but it is a permanent fix and it prevents animals from continually marking their territory after you’ve cleaned it.

Both places we’ve lived recently, the previous owners had pet stains in the carpets. This caused our old cat (RIP little buddy) to mark his territory in the corners of the walls. In our last house, this was mostly upstairs. Cat urine is one of the worst things to try to get rid of because when the urine dries it leaves behind crystals of uric acid.  When these crystals are dry, you won’t smell anything, but they will stink when they get wet. This is why you can clean up a pet accident, but the animal might continue to mark that same spot. They can still smell the uric acid. These crystals won’t easily be dissolved in water and detergent like other parts of pet urine so they are incredibly tough to remove. There are two ways to remove the smell. One is to seal it in, and the other is to use enzymes to break the crystals down completely.

In our upstairs in both our old home and our current home, the previous owners’ pet stains caused our cat to stake his claim in the same places. After a while, even after cleaning it with a carpet shampooer (which we went through several models of…) it still wouldn’t get completely rid of the smell and he would still mark. Any time we opened the windows, the humidity from outside would reactivate the crystals and the whole room would smell again. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and ripped the carpet out.

Now that’s a drastic step, I know, but it was disgusting before we moved in we just couldn’t afford to fix the problem then. Removing the carpet was only the first step. The next thing I had to do was remove the baseboards because the urine had wicked up into the baseboards which were made out of compressed dust and swollen. The only thing remaining with the smell was the wooden subfloor. There’s no way I’m replacing those, so I decided to seal them so no moisture could ever reach the crystals.

The Sealing method:

Regular paint won’t work as a good sealant for this kind of job as over time, the molecular structure has holes big enough for water to pass through. Now I don’t own a scanning electron microscope, but I know this because when I tried regular latex paint, humid and rainy days would reactivate the stink. In my research I found that Shellac had incredibly small pores once dry. Zinsser BIN is a white-pigmented premixed shellac sealer. This stuff is often used and marketed for permanently sealing in odors from smoke damage, mold and mildew, and pet odors. It works great!  I must warn you, it the shellac is in a denatured alcohol solvent. Basically, it smells like you are pouring vodka on the floor and you definitely need a lot of ventilation.

Putting down several coats of this will seal in the stink for good, then you can replace the baseboards and treat the floor. In our old house we used these peel and stick floor planks. In our current home, we actually just painted the subfloor in the whole room which gave it a really cool industrial look. We then made this room into our home office. It was also a great place to play guitar and sing due to all the echos. We left it this way until we could afford to redo the floor in the other parts of the house.

The Enzyme Method:

On our concrete slab, we also had pet odor issues. This time I went for the other method, using enzymes to remove the crystals all together. To kill the pet stank and prevent our cats from marking or remarking the areas, I treated the floor after removing the carpets. The entire floor had to be treated, so I had to do smaller areas one at a time. We’ve had experience with Simple Green enzyme odor removers in the past, but they had a fragrance that left the floor smelling like a port-a-potty. Another cleaner I got was Enzyme D which is hugely popular and used in many schools for cleaning body fluids, however after ordering a case of the stuff, I saw that its ingredients included a benzene-based salt in it. I’m no chemist, so I called the company. They were nice enough to connect me to their chemist who told me that the benzene is harmless since it was bound up in a salt. From what I know, salts dissociate in solvents such as water, which  (in my mind) would leave benzene ions loose and floating in the solution. Salts also form crystals when the water dries up, so unless you plan on super flushing the scene with water, there will be traces of benzene salt everywhere. With Jess expecting, I wasn’t about to risk it though, so we returned that cleaner.

The cleaner I ended up getting is the absolute best we’ve ever used! Vet’s Best Total Plus stain remover has a very mild fragrance which dissipated completely in a couple of days. It has enzymes as well as bacteria in it to help remove odors. Since the odors were really bad, I saturated the slab of concrete with this cleaner and quickly covered the area with giant plastic bags or plastic painters tarp. I then sat books and heavy boxes on the perimeter to keep the liquid contained as long as possible. The longer this stuff is liquid, the better it works. I let this sit  and eat away at the crystals for 3 or 4 days before removing the plastic and moving on t o the next section of flooring. This process took about 2 weeks to completely remove the pet odors from the entire concrete slab. I let the floor dry for a few days before putting down the flooring we chose, which you can read about in another post.

This completely removed the stink in all weather conditions, and our cats no longer feel the urge to purge on the floor. It has been some 2 years at this point and we’ve yet to have another incident or to smell anything!

UPDATE: WE’ve come across another great cleaner called Bioclean Bac-Out which uses enzymes and has a nice fresh lime scent. Since cats don’t like citrus smells this can help give them more of an aversion to using the same spot twice if there are accidents I’ve found.

      

Jess and I have always wanted hardwood floors. We could afford the flooring material if it was on sale, but we couldn’t afford the installation fees. Being the lovers of DIY, renovate the bathroom floor ourselves. The product we chose was COREtec One which is a click-type floating floor that has a dense bamboo foam backing and a PVC top.  The top of this material is stamped to give the relief of woodgrain.  For an additional fee you can get cork added to the backing, but we cheaped out and have had great results, even on a concrete slab this flooring stays warm and is softer than tile or wood. It is industrial quality and has a 10-year commercial limited wear warranty. We tested our ability to lay COREtec flooring in a small upstair bathroom. The results were great and with the right tools and a little ingenuity it wasn’t very hard at all.

The first step was to remove the strip holding the carpet down to the linoleum and Lauan floor of the bathroom. I always hated these kinds of transitions. You must use a flathead screwdriver and hammer to uncrimp the metal to pull back the carpet so you can then pull out the nails holding the metal strip to the floor.

     

Then we used the removed the molding in the bathroom. Using this long-bladed utility knife, I scored the silicone caulk on the top and bottom of each piece of trim. Then using a prybar and hammer, removed the trim. I then had to pull up the carpet in front of the bathroom as well, so the hammer and a regular prybar were used there. We decided that in this particular bathroom, we’d leave the Lauan and linoleum and just place the COREtec on top.

We decided we’d  like the boards to be long-ways from the entrance of the bathroom. One of the most important steps is to layout and measure first! Each box of COREtec has a limited number of patterns, so it is highly recommended that you pull planks from several different boxes to avoid repeating patterns too close together. With COREtec you don’t want to end up with a tiny sliver less than 2 inches wide as it won’t stay down well. We measured to see how many boards we’d need between the wall and the cabinet, then when we got past the cabinet, we measured wall to wall. We picked a number that would allow us to have at least 2 inches on every side.  To cut the pieces long-ways (a process called ripping) I used my 60-inch bandsaw with a wood blade in it. A note on this… My bandsaw is advertised as a “(9-inch bandsaw” and all the documentation said that in big letters on the front. That means there’s 9 inches between the saw blade and the other side of the saw (in the center of the machine). But when I went to the local big box hardware store I realized that there’s no such thing as a “9-inch bandsaw blade”. The blades are labeled in accordance with their circumference. So my saw technically uses 59.5-inch blades. I recommend buying several of these as I broke a couple with all the cuts I had to do.

For smaller cuts, I used my junior coping saw/mini hacksaw. I recommend getting  a few extra packs of blades for this guy as well. For our whole house, I went through one and a half packs of extra blades. This was really helpful for small notches or tweaks to cuts I had made on the bandsaw.As you can see in the pic, I am wearing kneepads. This is essential for floor work!  The ones I have have a great snap for putting them on quickly. This is good because you adjust them to the right size once, then the quick snaps can be used to put them on and take them off without a lot of wasted time getting them comfortable again.

 

Using pencils to mark the wood-side of the COREtec, I used an uncut piece of COREtec as a straightedge to make sure I didn’t waver too much, then I cut it by hand ripped each piece by hand on the bandsaw. Then, using a carpet knife to score the coretec and the edge of the countertop to snap it, we were able to quickly cut some pieces to lay. Since COREtec is a floating floor, you want to leave a 0.25″ gap from each wall to allow for the house to settle without damaging the floor. We got a hardwood floor laying kit that had a block, pull-bar and spacers in it. Placing the spacers all between the COREtec and the wall, we began laying the floor. Since COREtec snaps together in only one way, be careful to measure and cut the board to have the correct side where you need it. I screwed up many  aboard without triple checking this first.

You want to start laying the flooring if possible as those are the most likely to be straight. Most walls in homes are not straight. If you can’t start on the outside wall, start on the longest or with the right-hand side so you can clip the floor in to itself as you go. Place the spacers against the wall first. I found using cheap packing tape to keep them in place so they don’t move when you use the hammer and block to

We made our way across the floor until we got to the toilet.

Moving the Toilet:

The next step was to remove the toilet. So we turned the water to the tank off at the wall by turning the knob all the way closed and flushed the remainder of the water in the tank. There was still water in the tank so before disconnecting the hose from the wall, I grabbed a small plastic bucket to catch the remainder of the water from the tank. I also used this bucket to scoop out the remaining water in the bowl as well. I didn’t want that splashing around all over my carpet and subfloor. The next step was to remove the old bolts.  This is always a pain because men piss inevitable piss on the floor and sides of toilets and the piss as well as humidity from hot showers will corrode the bolts and rust the nuts onto them. I had to get my Dremel out and buy some new metal cutting disks. The designers over at Dremel are brilliant with their design of the EZ Lock Mandrel for the cutting wheels. This mandrel allows the cutting blades to flex about the shaft a small distance without snapping.  This was amazing to me as my whole life I’ve been breaking these stupid cutting wheels, finally someone designed the perfect solution to this annoying problem! If only they would solve the whole rusted bolts problem….  I digress.  Basically, I used the Dremel to slice the nuts in half on both sides of the bolt, then used pliers to pry off that broken bolt part from each side, being careful not to ever apply pressure with the plyers to the porcelain. That can crack and ruin a toilet.

Once the bolts were free, I lifted the toilet and tilted it so I could clean the soft wax off the bottom before moving it into the hallway. Always be careful moving toilets. The tanks are bolted to the bowl and if you don’t pick them up from the base you’ll crack the porcelain and need a new toilet. The wax seals the porcelain toilet to the plastic PVC flange on the pipe in the floor to prevent poo water from leaking. . I highly recommend wearing gloves because 1. It’s where the poop goes and 2. the wax is incredibly messy. Once that wax gets on something, it isn’t coming off easily, including your hands. You can wash then 100 times and still feel it. And when you remove a toilet, use a wad of old towels or rags to stuff into the open sewer pipe to prevent too much sewer gas from coming up.  We moved the toilet just far enough away to work in that area and places it on a plastic bag so it wouldn’t damage or get wax on the new flooring.

        

When you replace the toilet, you’ll need a new seal and new bolts. Buy these BEFORE you move the toilet. I hate the wax rings for toilets because you get one shot to put it on correctly, and you don’t really know if you did it right until weeks later when the floor is ruined from underneath from leaking poop-water. I prefer this foam gasket kit which comes with the new bolts you’ll need too. This replaces the wax, so use a putty knife (one you don’t really care about) to remove the wax from the toilet flange in the floor.

 

      

We made great time laying the new floor due to all the straight cuts and good measuring plan we had. The tougher part came when we had to cut the circular hole for the toilet pipe flange. My solution was to use the gasket I bought to replace the wax ring under the toilet as a template and laid the boards flat across the hole and traced the new gasket on the boards. Cutting the with the bandsaw was fast after that. Click in the last bit of flooring, whack the pull-bar a couple of times to make it cinch tight, and then remove the plastic spacers from the perimeter of the walls.

Install the new foam gasket and bolts on the toilet flange. It turns out that since we laid the COREtec on top of the Lauan and linoleum we had a perfect amount of space for this gasket to work with our toilet. Set the toilet on the bolts and tighten snug, but not too tight. If you overtighten the bolts, they’ll crack the porcelain and you’ll end up buying a new toilet.

If the gasket is too tall and your toilet rocks  back and forth and you can’t tighten the bolts any more without risking damage to the toilet, then you have two options and I tried them both. You can buy toilet shims, which are plastic wedges you can shove under the toilet every couple inches to even it out. I didn’t really like this option as it didn’t support the entire toilet and if the gap was too small to hide the whole shim, I had to cut off the visible part with a utility knife. I scratched the floor pretty bad doing this and it still looked terrible. The better option is to buy or make a toilet spacer. I used scrap COREtec to build a toilet spacer by tracing the hole like I did before on some COREtec, but then after I cut the hole and put everything in place with the toilet on top I traced the outline of the toilet.  Then I used the bandsaw to cut just inside the lines by about a millimeter or so.  This made for a much more stable solution.

Either way you go, shims or spacer, you’ll likely have to clean up the look with caulk. Now some people (including me) say never caulk the base of a toilet in case there is a leak.  But since I am using the foam gasket,I know there won’t be a leak. So I caulked around the edge of the toilet to hide the shims and the gap in one bathroom, and then to hide the edge of the COREtec spacer I made in the other.

Once finished, you must put the trim back on and caulk it, then figure out how you want to have the transition back to carpet in the hallway look. To nail the trim back on, you’ll need a nail gun. After researching extensively, I decided that an electric nail gun was easier and cheaper, but would not do a good job at all. So I had an excuse to buy this air compressor and this pneumatic air gun. I cannot stress enough how this tool changed my life. Using the nail gun, I finished the bathroom in literally about 2 minutes. In the past this type of thing took me about half an hour to do. The trick here is to make sure you’re using enough pressure to get the brads fully into the trim without the heads sticking out. If the heads stick out then you have to manually hammer them in with a nail set which is a pain. When nailing against a cabinet or a wall, you can angle the brands pretty much anywhere, into the floor to the wall but when nailing the trim by the tub only shoot brads directly into the floor, NEVER into the tub. It can crack your fiberglass or acrylic tub and that ain’t cheap.

After the trim is back up, use some silicone caulk (this stuff requires a caulking gun) to seal it back on the top as well as on the floor to make it water-tight. Use one of these caulk-spreading tools to get a nice consistent finish. Since COREtec is waterproof, you should feel confident about any spills or wetness on the floor.

Finishing the edge of the carpet is covered in another post.