5 Carpet Mistakes Farmington Landlords Keep Making (And What They Cost You)
Carpet Mistakes Farmington Landlords Make
Carpet Mistakes Farmington Landlords Make – I’ve been doing carpet here in Farmington long enough to see the same five mistakes on repeat. Doesn’t matter if it’s a duplex over by Animas Valley Mall or a rental on Crouch Mesa — landlords keep paying for the same problems.
Some of these I see twice a month. So if you own rentals around San Juan County, this one’s for you.
1. Buying the cheapest carpet you can find
I get it. Tenant just moved out, the unit smells like cigarettes and dog, and you need to flip it before next month’s mortgage payment. The instinct is to grab the $1.29/sq ft builder-grade stuff and call it done.
Here’s the problem. That cheap carpet looks fine for about 8 months. Then the traffic lanes mat down, the seams start showing, and your next tenant moves out 14 months later and you’re replacing it again. So now you’ve paid for carpet twice in two years instead of one decent install that lasts four.
The math almost never works out. Spend a little more on a mid-grade nylon or a solution-dyed polyester and you’ll get through 2 or 3 tenant cycles before it needs to go. That’s the play.
2. Skipping the pad upgrade
Pad is where landlords cut corners and it’s the dumbest place to do it. A good 8-pound rebond pad costs maybe $50 more on a 1,000 sq ft job. That same pad is what makes cheap carpet feel decent and what makes good carpet last twice as long.
Cheap pad compresses in six months. Once the pad is dead, the carpet on top of it wears out fast no matter what you spent on it. I’ve pulled up perfectly good carpet that was ruined because the pad underneath turned to cardboard.
3. Picking the wrong color (yes, it matters)
Beige is fine. Dark brown is a mistake. So is anything close to white.
Around here we get red dirt tracked in constantly — anyone who’s lived in Farmington more than a season knows what I mean. Spring wind kicks up and that fine red dust from Arizona comes across the border and is in everything. Dark carpet shows every speck of it. Light carpet shows every stain.
The middle-tone tans, soft grays with warm undertones, and “mushroom” colors are what hide the most between cleanings. They also don’t go out of style as fast, which matters when you’re not redoing this for another 5 years.
4. Not addressing the smell before new carpet goes down
This one drives me crazy. Tenant had a cat for three years, peed in the corner of the bedroom, you can smell it the second you walk in. Landlord wants new carpet over the top.
New carpet does not fix this. The smell is in the subfloor. The pad locks it in for a few weeks and then it comes right back through, and now your new tenant is calling you in month two asking why the bedroom smells like a litter box.
If there’s pet damage, the subfloor needs to be sealed with a proper primer (Kilz Original or similar oil-based) before anything goes back down. Sometimes you have to cut out and replace a section of OSB. It’s an extra hundred bucks and an extra day. Skip it and you’ll do the whole job over.
5. Trying to coordinate the install themselves
I see landlords who own 4 or 5 units try to play project manager — measure it themselves, order from a big box, hire a separate installer off Craigslist. Then something goes wrong. Wrong amount of carpet ordered, installer no-shows, seams pop a month later and nobody’s responsible.
When you use one shop for the measure, the material, and the install, there’s one phone number to call when something goes sideways. And it almost never goes sideways in the first place because the same people who measured it are the ones laying it.
That’s worth something, especially when you’ve got a tenant scheduled to move in Friday.
If you own rentals in Farmington, Aztec, Bloomfield, or anywhere in San Juan County and you’re tired of redoing carpet every other tenant, give us a call. We do landlord pricing on multi-unit jobs and we can usually turn a unit in 2-3 days from measure to move-in ready.
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