Articles By Syndicated Columnist
Dan Thomas
© Copyright Home
Improvement Inside And Out
Repairing
A Burn In Your Carpet
Sometimes burns in a carpet can be fixed. If only the ends of
your carpet are burned, cut off the burnt fibers with a small pair of scissors.
Sponge the area that you have repaired gently with a mild detergent and once
more with clean water. The lower spots will not be visible when your carpet
dries.
If a burn goes all the way to the backing but the backing isn't burned, the
carpet cam be repaired by removing the charred fibers and inserting new ones.
Carefully cut out the burned fibers, and then pull the stubs out of the
backing with tweezers. Clean our the entire burn area. so that the woven
backing is exposed in the hole.
To fill the hole, unravel fibers from the edge of a scrap piece of carpet.
You will need enough individual tufts of yarn to place one tuft in each
opening in the backing. If you do not have a scrap piece of carpet use tufts
from an area of the carpet that is not noticeable. A great place to get some
tuffs of carpet is from the carpet on your closet floor.
Apply a little latex adhesive to the exposed backing.
Use a carpet tuft-setting tool to inset the new fibers. Fold each fiber in
half to form a V and place the folded tuft into the tuft-setter. Set the tip of the tuft-setter into the opening on the
backing and strike the handle lightly with a hammer. When you lift the
tuft-setter, the fiber will stay in the carpet backing.
Set fibers across the entire burn area, one at a time. Your repair area
should match the rest of the carpet in density and depth: if a tuft does not
match in height, you can adjust it by pulling it up a little with tweezers.
You can also tap it down again with the tuft-setter.
When the hole is completely filled, cut off any protruding fibers flush
with the rest of the pile. You should not be able to see where the burn had
been.
