Three days ago, yours truly had to deal with flooding in his house. So I now know how to clean concrete, dry carpet, replace padding, and stretch carpet back into place. Now you might say to yourself, “Steven, what are you going to do with that knowledge?” Where I would reply, “I am going to teach you how to do it too!”
With water in your carpet, the most important this is to make sure it is 100% dry when you put it back in place. Another extremely important thing is to ensure that you do not keep ANY wet carpet padding. Even if it is damp or somewhat moist. IT WILL NOT DRY. EVER.
I will list tools that you need so you can repair it yourself:
Industrial blower – can be rented at The Home Depot or Lowe’s
Carpet stretcher: manual or automatic – also can be rented at The Home Depot or Lowe’s
Carpet padding: comes in pink, green, and blue. They have different purposes and thicknesses
Masking tape
Broom/Dustpan, or a Shop vac
Bleach/water mixture, or something that would kill mold or mildew
The first thing that need to happen is that you need to take action. You cannot wait a few days to get this problem taken care of. Waiting a few days will be enough time for water to get in your walls and cause major problems.
1) You should immediately start getting the excess water up with anything absorbent. If you have something that will suck up water, even better.
2) Once you have gotten the water up, you need to asses the damage. Find out how far the water has gone. You can do this by pulling the carpet up. Capet is held down by tack strips, which are wooden strips nailed into your foundation. They have little spikes sticking out of them that hold the carpet down. Find a corner of your carpet and start pulling the carpet up. Now there are some colors of padding that are easy to see if they are wet. If you can see the wetness, great. Otherwise you are going to have to feel. The easiest way to get carpet back away from the wet area is to roll it. Bunching it up, though effective, is harder to manage.
3) Once you have rolled the carpet away from the wet areas you can see where the wet padding is. Padding is never cut in one giant piece to fit your house. It is usually 6 feet wide and however long it is needed to be. Now you have assessed where the wet padding is, pull it up and get rid of it. It will be very heavy, so you should have someone helping.
*Sometimes padding will be glued down and stick to the floor – be sure to pull ALL padding up off of the flood that is wet.
4) Now that the wet padding is out of here, this is where your blower, broom/shop vac, and bleach water come into play. You might notice that on the wet floor there is a yellow muck on it. This is what has been pushed through your carpet by walking on it and doing other various things. This needs to come off the floor before you lay padding down. There are two ways to do it. You can scoop up the wet muck, or you can dry it then sweep/shop vac it up. Now that this is done, you need to spray the bleach/water mix on the concrete and let it dry.
5) Now that the concrete is dry, you need to unroll the carpet and lay it back into place without the padding underneath. While you are unrolling the carpet spray the UNDERSIDE of the carpet with the bleach/water mix to help prevent a musty smell from the carpet once it is cleaned.
6) Once the carpet is loosely back in place, you need to get it dry by placing the blower underneath the carpet for at least 24 hours. During this 24 hours you need rotate the placement of the dryer to ensure complete dryness in the carpet.
7) Once the carpet is dry, roll the carpet back up and begin to lay down the padding. The important thing about laying down the padding is to make sure that the pad touches the tack strip. Sections of padding should be taped together to ensure that there is no buckling of the carpet.
Once all of the padding is down, unroll the carpet and begin to stretch the carpet. Here is an example of carpet stretching technique.
You are done. It is a tough job, but home repair is extremely rewarding.
I have hardwood floors.