Tried glue-down vs stretch-in on a big commercial job last month and one was way easier

I had a 3,000 square foot office space to carpet in Austin and decided to try glue-down on one half and stretch-in on the other just to see the difference. The glue-down side took me like 4 hours less because I didn't have to mess with tack strips or power stretching around all those cubicle legs. But man, the cleanup was brutal - that adhesive got everywhere and I was scrubbing my knees for days after. The stretch-in side looked cleaner under the desks and had way less waste since I could reuse scraps. Has anyone else found glue-down to be worse on smaller spaces under 500 feet?

2 comments

2 Comments

nathan90123h ago

Used to be all about glue-down but you might be onto something here.

davis.noah23h ago

Man, I switched to a tackifier about six months ago after having the same issue you're talking about @nathan901. I was getting tired of how long glue-down took to set, and the cleanup was always a pain. What finally worked for me was using a hybrid tackifier with a brush-on primer on the subfloor first, let it tack up for about 10 minutes, then lay the planks. It cut my install time by like a third and I haven't had any lifting or edge curl since. Plus, if I mess up a plank, I can still pull it up without destroying everything around it.