Herringbone Carpet Layout

Been working here 2 and a half nights now. This area is about 125 s/y or so. I chalked a line down the center of the room. On a herringbone pattern there's two points where the tiles/planks meet. The CENTER of those two points has to be aligned along the chalk line drawn down the center of the room.

Follow?

So depending on the size of the material-----in this case 18" x 36" carpet tile you dry lay some flooring up the center line in the herringbone pattern to ascertain the correct measure from those two points to the center line.

Still following?

Then you snap those other two lines and you have the layout centered in ONE direction. To get the layout to the perpendicular walls if it's a smaller size area just dry fit. In a bigger space you dry fit enough flooring to get a measurement you can then multiply and find out the best size cuts for that particular material in that particular space.

It's not east to do. It's even harder to explain.

Maybe pictures will help.

 

Don't tell ANYONE I said this CFR but there's a few other glitches in everyone's best laid schemes-------besides the fugly colors.

#1. Large format tile------INCLUDING carpet tile require a VERY flat substrate or you get GAPS as you install. They're just not going to lay out snug over a wavy, irregular floor. Of course you know that.

#2. Again, larger format tile with a distinct, FUNKADELIC pattern over a wavy, irregular substrate will highlight those imperfections and in an example as shown in the photos above make you sick to your stomach like someone on a cruise ship suffering from motion sickness. All those designs and forms are created with a 2 dimensional frame of mind. The 12th story of a 25 year old building in earthquake country isn't 2 dimensional. SURPRISE! Ten hundred zillion pounds of steel and concrete will tend to settle and cause quite a bit of rolling action in the concrete. You can fix that with a few thousand bags of Ardex K15 and a couple months of labor. Or you can look the other way, smear it up and slap a few thousand yards of carpet tile down and call it a day.

Guess what happens in real life?

 

Back for more. On this floor they contaminated the everloving shit out of the slab. It wasn't in horrible shape before the drywall mud, paint and monocoat was slopped thoroughly over the entire floor. Poor kids been out here 2 weeks and got chewed out by the Bossman for not hitting his numbers (production). I did another floor and it was before the monocoat. Besides that I got the GC to authorize about 50-60 man hours of EXTRA FLOOR PREP.

The "kid" just doesn't know how the game is played. I gave him a little "Good Cop" lecture to help him understand the Bossman's perspective. They threw him in the deep end.

 

We'd generally have a guy smearing glue, one guy laying the field tiles off of 4 wheel dollies and an apprentice/helper humping tiles off the pallets and onto dollies and rolling them in full, taking them away empty and then bringing them back full again. The guy smearing the glue can often start cutting in by the time he's a spread up. It's nice to get the cove base on ASAP on jobs like this because the GC is right back on top of you obstructing access to the walls if you leave that for later. The layouts, backing types, how hard the cuts are, prep and base complications ultimately dictate how the manpower gets distributed. But your formula is the basic/standard mode of operation, yes.

No boxes to open! There's just a big cardboard wrapper to splice open and toss aside. It makes a nice floor protection to mix patch on for the next areas.

 

My hardhats stay on my head until I take them off. You fairly quickly forget they are on, same as the vest and steel toe boots. The glasses are the thing I cant ever get used to. ESPECIALLY wearing a vest, hard hat and steel toe boots you're going to steam those up in a heartbeat. Dust then accumulates/sticks on the wet glass (plastic). We keep the glasses stored up inside the hard hat and put them on when the safety geeks come round. On any large job they tend to make ONE pass at the same time of day. So we play THAT game.

 

Finished the last floor of this contract Thursday. It was really nasty as the GC was behind schedule and forced us in to "deal" with the other trades. They paid for our extra labor so we have to comply. The majority was the carpet tile......a couple thousand yards plus or minus. Also baout three thousand square feet of Armstrong Biobased 12"x24" tile and a couple thousand more sqaure feet of vinyl planks.

 

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Multiple dye lots on the same floor would be something the salesman who ordered the materials would have to tell me how to handle on site. I've never deliberately mixed tiles from different lots randomly into a single area. We always try to find a distinct point or seperate rooms to make the break.

I worked on 5 different floors of this building and the shop did a handful more 3-4 I think that I wasn't involved with. There were half a dozen different colors in all. They got some of that mixed up unintentially as the the style/names of the colors was labeled on the cartons and plans in a very confusing manner. We wound up 25 s/y short on the last day as the salesman misread the color for one area. That wrong carpet tile was delivered and installed before the mistake was caught. It was 125 s/y had to be pulled up and re-palletized. Lucky we had 100 extra of the correct color so they only had to order 25 more yards and it was available locally. I didn't go back to do that fix. I sure hope they got the same dye lot!

 

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Almost all commercial carpet tile installations want you to allow the adhesive to fully set "dry to the touch". When that is called for the "pressure sensitive" adhesive can also be labeled as a "releasable adhesive". Therefore so long as your sweeping and prepping in some regard for human decency the installation is not a PERMANENT BOND. So any and all tiles can be easily peeled back (removed and replaced) without even re-gluing. The apprentice peel the tile and stacke them neatly back to back---because there is some slime on the backing of course----and then haul them over, out of the way to be stacked back wherefrom they came.

I was laying the planks and the dude in those photos actually laying the planks was the foreman. We had glued up the last area when this was brought to his attention by the GC Project Manager. Juan is cool as a cucumber. He left me to complete the planks, grabbed a couple apprentices and a carpet layer to help him clean up the mess and it wasn't more than an hour that the whole room was demoed, re-palletized and re-installed with the correct carpet/layout. Of course the diagonal cuts from the herringbone pattern became waste.

Lucky we had 6 men that last day. We were supposed to be 100% finished or subject to $7400 per day penalty. Because we ate that HUGE shit sandwich for so much of this project and Juan is such a cool cat (as opposed to me) the GC never even considered sticking it to our company for bringing the job in one day late.

That's the name of that tune.