I recently had a carpet fitter lay a carpet. I'd previously had an estimator round who'd sized everything up and examined the existing floor surface, and left with no comment.
However, when the fitter pitched up to do the job, his jaw dropped when he saw that much of the ground floor was covered in old quarry tiles. He told me that it was basically impossible to carpet over them as they are too hard to nail down binder bars or use tacks, and you can't use gripfill etc to glue the binder bar down as it won't stick properly.
(The tiles concerned were in really crap condition; and even if I'd ripped them up - a very large undertaking - I'd have been left with having to lay a new screed to bring the floor up to the right level)
The guy dissapeared off out of my earshot to make a heated phone call to the estimator, and returned to say that he'd do the job using spray adhesive, which he did. He basically glued down the underlay, then glued the carpet to the underlay, all using this odd stringy spray stuff.
The result looked fine I have to say, but it seems a very odd way of doing the job. It was only cheap carpet, and I am selling the property anyway, so in this case I'm not overly bothered about the long-term; however I'd still like to know - was this an appropriate way to do the job?
David