LESLIE: Nancy in Colorado needs some help with carpeting. What can we do for you?
NANCY: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. We have an outdoor carpet on a patio. Our home was built in the 70s and I …
TOM: Mm-hmm. It was popular back there, wasn’t it, Nancy?
NANCY: I think maybe so.
TOM: Not such a good idea today, though.
NANCY: No. I haven’t even told my husband, until I made the phone calls, that I was even thinking about wanting to do it.
TOM: (chuckling) OK. Now that the idea is out, how can we help?
NANCY: Well, do you have suggestions on how to take it off the concrete patio pad?
TOM: Well, the carpet comes off easy; it’s the glue that doesn’t come off so easy. (Nancy chuckles)
LESLIE: And the remnants of the carpet.
NANCY: Yeah.
TOM: Yeah, exactly. You know what you’re probably going to end up doing here is taking the carpet off, scraping as much glue as possible off of that old slab and then I would use an epoxy paint. And you can do a really good job painting a slab and have it look very, very attractive today and that will kind of hide all of these sins and, in fact, there are some cool techniques where you can sort of paint the appearance of carpet on …
LESLIE: Or even tile.
TOM: Yeah, or tile on slabs and have it look really attractive.
NANCY: OK, yeah. Well, I …
TOM: Aren’t there like stencils for that, Leslie?
LESLIE: Well, there are oversized stencils – I think the website is ConcreteResourcesinc.com – and there’s large stencils that you can get for an entire, you know, concrete patio that will help you. But you can lay out a tile pattern with tape and you can use the grayness of the concrete or even you can paint a gray basecoat – let that dry – to create a grout line and then you can create a beautiful terracotta-look tile.
NANCY: Oh, that sounds great.
LESLIE: I mean there are ways to do it. As long as you get proper concrete paint and prep the surface properly, you can really make something very, very attractive.
NANCY: OK, well thanks for your encouragement. I appreciate that.
TOM: You’re welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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