When your carpet starts to fray around the edges you may think that all hope is lost, but worry not.
Not only are there quite a few methods to prevent and treat your carpets if they start to fray, but they’re easy to do as well.
Why Do Carpets Fray Around The Edges?
Carpets will fray around the edges for a variety of reasons. ranging from poor quality installation to damage from moving furniture around.
Let’s take a deeper look into the reasons why your carpet might have frayed at the edges so you can understand how to prevent it in the first place.
Poor Installation
If your carpet isn’t installed to a high standard this can easily lead to problems with fraying and even rippling. The most popular way to fit carpet is using strips of wood around the edges of a room that have multiple nails angles towards the wall. Once the padding is added to the floor, the carpet is fitted to the nails and stretched to fit.
If the carpet hasn’t been stretched properly, or even worse fitted to the nails correctly, then the chances of your carpet fraying increase drastically. Always make sure you have your carpet fitted by a professional, and if you dare to do it yourself then make sure you take your time.
Another way of fitting a carpet is using glue to secure the padding to the floor, and then the carpet to the padding. This can be even more prone to fraying further down the line as glue can lose its effectiveness throughout the years.
Moving Furniture
When moving large pieces of furniture around such as sofas or lounge chairs, you may find yourself dragging heavy items directly across your carpet.
This can cause some serious damage to your carpet and cause fraying further down the line by loosening the fit of your carpet to the floor; either by damaging the glue or the nails. If you want to increase the lifespan of your carpet always lift furniture entirely off the ground, preferable with two or more people to make sure you don’t drop anything or injure yourself.
Poor Maintenance and Cleaning
Another reason why carpets fray is because they aren’t cleaned regularly enough. A carpet should really be vacuumed properly a minimum of once per week, with professional deep cleans being booked at least once per year or more depending on your situation.
A dirty carpet can contain lots of smaller particles of dust and debris. When you walk over a carpet that contains a lot of these smaller particles it can create friction between the fibres of the carpet and the particles leading to fraying.
This applies even more so to the corners of a carpet and this is where the majority of debris will collect naturally, as most people forget to vacuum this part of their carpet properly.
Foot Traffic
The amount of people walking over a carpet per day is directly related to the chances of your carpet fraying. A carpet will only last as long as it is maintained properly, and if people are walking over a carpet more often it will lead to more damage and problems sooner.
Consider using a rug to protect areas of your carpet that receive the most footfall, as it is much cheaper to replace a rug than an entire carpet!
How To Prevent Frayed Edges On A Carpet – 4 Top Tips
Now that you understand the reasons why carpets fray, let’s take a look at the methods you can use to treat frayed edges before having to replace your entire carpet.
This will not only save you time but a lot of money too!
1. Use Tape
As one of the main issues that cause fraying in the first place is the loss of grip from the carpet to the floor, a rug gripper tape can work wonders to secure your carpet back to the ground.
The tape used for this is double-sided, and a good brand will have very high grip strength to make sure your frayed carpet edges can be secured back to the floor to prevent any further damage. Our personal choice is this extra strong double-sided rug gripper tape by DIY DOCTOR, which will give your carpet a new lease of life if you decide to pick some up.
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2. Remove the Frayed Carpet Edge
A more simple approach would be to remove the frayed edge of your carpet.
If done right this method can actually not look as bad as you would think, but it does require a couple of steps:
- Mark the edge that you want to cut with a non-permanent marker, anything will do but make sure it won’t leave a mark.
- Cut the edge using a very, very sharp knife. This is important because you’ll want the cut to look as clean as possible
And that’s it, really. Cutting a frayed edge of a carpet can be quite straightforward once you’ve found the courage to do it!
3. Binding Machine
Another method of binding your carpet other than using tape is to take your carpet into a carpet store and let them bind it using a specialised machine.
This piece of equipment will give you a much higher quality of finish, but this will of course cost a little bit more.
4. Use Adhesive
Using an adhesive is the same principle as tape, but simply using a different method of binding the carpet to the ground.
The benefit of using an adhesive is that you’re more likely to get a stronger, more lasting grip. This does have a drawback, however, that an adhesive will likely leave a permanent mark when compared to tape that can be removed and cause no marks.
Common adhesives that are used include carpet adhesive spray or carpet glue.
Final Thoughts
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. We hope you’ve managed to learn how to prevent your carpet from fraying at the edges.
You can check out our other carpet articles here if you want to learn more about carpets and how to maintain them!
