Someone wrote to ask if I’d ever installed carpet.  Actually, I had; I put down almost two thousand square feet of carpet in my house.  My wife and I did it by ourselves.  But we didn’t do it in the old, labor intensive way. My knees couldn’t take it! We used Legato Carpet squares. 

Framed print of man with hoe found on Amazon

Ever heard of them?  They are these 22 inch by 23 inch squares of carpet that you lay down like tile.  They fit together so well that after vacuuming you have no clue that they are there and they seem to wear like iron.  You don’t have to spend days moving furniture and stretching carpet only to discover you measured the whole darn thing wrong! 

Legato Carpet Squares Found on Amazon 

No, I’m not getting paid for advertising them, but I do believe they are a great way to go if you have pets.  On a couple of occasions my Jack Russell terriers disgraced themselves and I had to wash the squares.  Nothing to it; toss them in the bathtub and hang them up till they dry.  They fit back in place as if nothing had happened.  Try doing that with carpet tacked down in the normal fashion…

It’s all find and good to look back on the past with a moist eye, but Yes! you bet I’m glad to be living in the Twenty-first Century!  The old way of laying carpet ruined the knees of a lot of good men before their time.  Laying Carpet, like roofing is one of those things that remind me of farming–something I only know by reputation and want nothing to do with as it looks too much like work.  At the end of the day I would look and feel like the picture above, an artist’s depiction of a poem by Edwin Markham:

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back, the burden of the world.

Edwin Markham’s complete poems at the Kindle Store for only 99 cents!!