Tried stretching carpet with a knee kicker on stairs instead of a power stretcher

I had this set of stairs in a house outside Denver last Tuesday and thought I could save some setup time by just using my knee kicker instead of hauling the power stretcher up there. Big mistake. By the third stair I was sweating buckets and my knee was screaming at me. What really got me was how uneven the whole thing looked when I stepped back. I had ripples in spots I couldn't even see from the top. Took me almost twice as long to fix it all compared to if I'd just grabbed the power stretcher from the start. Has anyone else tried to skip a tool on stairs and ended up paying for it twice as bad?

2 comments

2 Comments

dakota_rivera22d ago

Had a buddy try the same thing on his basement stairs last winter and ended up pulling something in his back so bad he couldn't work for three days. He said the carpet looked like a wrinkled shirt by the time he finished fighting with it. Told me later he would have paid double just to have the power stretcher up there from the start.

price.alice22d ago

Knee kickers work fine on carpet padding with a solid concrete subfloor underneath.