Friday, May 25, 2012

Where's "Waldo" this Weekend?!

In the market for a new carpet?!

You can catch "Waldo" in Wallingford, CT this weekend
at the


Image courtesy of a google search: http://www.animationmagazine.net/features/classics-wheres-waldo-finds-its-way-to-mgm/
DWP Carpet Binding will be closed on Monday, May 28th in observation of Memorial Day!

Have a great weekend, everybody!!

Friday, May 18, 2012

Just Hanging Around...

By this time, if you've read any of our blogs, you already know that we try to be environmentally conscious when dealing with scrap pieces of carpet. Dan is adamant about making everything useful to prevent it from going to a landfill. This is very cool because we get to create some very unique pieces from scrap carpet. The designs are based on whatever our minds envision at the time and there is not limit on shape and size! Although I've listed these pieces online previously and they've received a lot of "views" they just don't seem to sell. So, I dedicate this blog to showing off some of DWP Carpet Binding's "Thinking Green" work! The majority of these pieces are in house, waiting for a good home to go to! The images below are courtesy of Kevin Hupfer, who did a wonderful job photographing & editing them!





It's easy to see that these pieces will NOT be found in stores. This makes them truly unique. Not only are we helping keep an Earth-friendly work ethic, we're creating pieces that aren't massed produced! Below you will see custom pieces I've made as gifts (or just for fun), followed by more custom pieces from our "Thinking Green" pieces.























There are endless possibilities when you have scrap pieces of various sizes laying around. DWP Carpet Binding likes to put these into the form of a useful area rug. With a little brain-storming, a lot of labor and just a touch of conscientiousness we have these wonderful pieces available for sale! If you're interested in one or more of these please feel free to call and ask for a price! They're just hanging around (literally and figuratively). 



As always, 
DWP Carpet Binding would like to say  
THANK YOU 
to our customers!!!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Friday, May 4, 2012

Happy Friday!

There's good reason to be happy!

DWP Carpet Binding got their "Welcome" packet in the mail today! 
Officially Accredited. 

Many a times our customers have asked me, "How do you stand him all day?!" or "How can you work with him?!" referring to Dan. The truth is, he's a great man who is honest and hard-working, but more importantly he makes me laugh all the time! He's got great one liners. Last week we had a customer coming into our shop for the first time and as Dan is directing him, over the phone, where to go he says "Can you see me waving at you?! Can you see me blowing you a kiss?!" He wasn't even outside! How is that not hysterical? Seriously? 

There's nothing better than when Dan starts belting out a song (most likely out of tune) and follows it up with "I missed my calling. I should be on America's Got Talent or American Idol." 

The truth is, Dan has earned every "accreditation" one can receive. He is not only a very hard-worker, he's a good human being. At the same time he's worried about the economy picking up, he's giving hefty discounts to people or correcting a job (that is no fault of DWP's) for free or discounted just so our customer doesn't have to eat the cost.There aren't too many people out there who look out for their customer. Many people are just looking out for their wallet. 
I'm proud to say that Dan is not one of these business men; which makes working for him so much easier and admirable. 

We may not be swimming in money, but we are swimming in honor! 
That is far more valuable than any other aspect of business. 

Congratulations, Dan! You've earned this accreditation with every drop of sweat, every hour of over-time and every bad joke you've said to charm your customers. If nothing else, you are trustworthy and that makes you an ally in anybody's corner!

Here's to ending the weekend on a happy note-
Have a great weekend everybody!

Thank you for your business!

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

"...Kid Tested..." Better Business Bureau Approved!

   DWP Carpet Binding is absolutely thrilled to announce that we just recently received notice that we are approved for the Better Business Bureau accreditation. In the near future you'll start seeing the BBB seal of approval on all of our marketing tools. Which mainly consist of our web-site and this blog, but you'll still see it!

   Aside from making that exciting announcement, today I will discuss how you turn an 8-hour project into a 3.5-hour project. DWP Carpet Binding recently received in a HUGE custom project. I'm not joking when I say it was huge. It was a beautiful custom piece for a stairway landing that had a running length of 58 feet! DWP Carpet Binding was to serge all but two areas, where staircase runners would be hooking into the landing. 
Below you will see a diagram of what the job entailed.
Diagram installers used to cut custom piece to size.

As you can see on the page, the piece was so big that the running length had to be continued in the secondary half of the page. Now, I can't speak for Dan, but when we received this job in there was only one thing that crossed my mind:
[Cue Walt Disney's Pooh Bear, "Oh Bother."]
[Cue Walt Disney's Piglet, "Oh d-d-d-Dear!"]
Ok, so that's two things that crossed my mind. I didn't think that this project was going to be easy at all. I even cringed a little bit when I heard Dan tell the installer, "That is a seven to eight hour project, without exaggeration." 

Hey, in this economy, when there is work you take it and you are happy to have it! Although it was intimidating at best, we put our best two man team on it. Clearly that's a joke since we only have two people in house to do the work. We went to work on the big project. It required a lot of rolling back and forth, folding the carpet here and there in order to access certain sides or corners and a lot of focus. Every move had to be direct, yet delicate (as there were a few seamed areas that you can not mishandle).  

This custom size and shaped piece didn't even fit on our 28 foot work table. Well, the width did, but that's about it. What Dan and I did as a team was calculate our every move to avoid having to do extra/unnecessary work. When we finished one end, we rolled the 58 footer to the opposite end.
This is what that looked like:
Custom shape & size: upper hallway landing.
You can see the many jogs and cut-outs there are on this one end. The opposite end was not as intricate, yet it was similar. Every area you see a 90 degree angle, or a perpendicular side, is where we have to "relieve cut" the carpet in order for our serging machine to pass through the side. A "relief cut" (your vocab phrase of the day) is when you cut the carpet, then after you fabricate it with binding or serging, you re-glue the carpet back together. Most custom shaped pieces will require "relief cuts" in order to complete the fabrication process.

After 3.5 hours the project was completed! DWP Carpet Binding's team worked diligently to turn an 8-hour project into less time ... though, with a two man team, it only really deducted an hour away from the projected time of completion.

DWP Carpet Binding is happy to say we can turn these crazy custom pieces into fabulously fabricated finished carpets! As complicated or complex as wall-to-wall pieces or custom pieces may become, we knock 'em out of the ballpark every time. Sometimes it's just a matter of patience. Sometimes it's a matter of working smart, not hard, as some would say. In this case, this is exactly what the team did. Worked smart.

If you have custom pieces that seem "impossible" to fabricate, please consider sending it into DWP Carpet Binding for a professional and precise binding or serging job.

Now for a Customer "Thank You" Shout Out!
DWP Carpet Binding would like to thank:
Phil & Sandy
Linda
Mary
Kerri 
Mike
Mark 
Kevin 
Laura & Bruce
and last but certainly not least,
All of the customers who continue to use
 DWP Carpet Binding for all of their binding needs!

Friday, April 20, 2012

Beveling & Hand-Binding-

Upon creating our web-site a handful of years ago, it was important to make sure to write accurate and informative information. Keywords were a must. After having our site built our web-master, Demetri, kept telling me, "Kelly, we need more keywords... We've got to get the googlebots to pick your site up!" and I would think "How many times can I say carpet binding, serging, fringing, sisal binding, etc. in one paragraph?!" 

While I was coming up with all the information needed to build the web-site I checked in on other binding shops to see what they posted. In doing so , I found something I found intriguing. One of the sites posted that they too have serging machines that bind and serge simultaneously. They followed this information with saying that the simultaneous action of binding and serging means that the carpet wouldn't have to be power beveled. I have to say that this isn't true at all. If a carpet is thick and needs power beveling in order to bind, the same would hold true for serging. In the past we have had customers tell us "No, it doesn't need to be beveled." or complain about the small up-charge that they accrue because of power beveling. So, I recently ran a test. We had a thick plush carpet in house for binding. I decided to see what happens if you DON'T bevel the fibers, prior to binding. Guess what happened? The binding didn't catch to the backing of the carpet, rather the stitching was on the carpet fibers. If the work were not double checked, a binder may not pick up on this. The truth is that because of where the stitching was, I could pull the binding right off with no effort. If a carpet is thicker in nature, than it will need to be beveled in order to proper fabricate the piece, whether binding, serging, fringing or what-have-you. The simultaneous action of binding and serging (on certain serging models) does not change where the stitching occurs. This is why beveling, although an additional cost, is imperative in order to properly bind a piece.
Thick shag carpet- beveled to serge. Notice the difference of fiber lay-out with beveling vs. without.
 Another important factor is the clearance of the folder. Our sergining machine only has about 1/4" clearance for a piece to pass through. If it is thicker than that, the machine would get stuck and stitch in the same place repetitively.
Serging machine: showing folder clearance, carpet has to fit into to fabricate.
 We bevel A LOT of carpets. Typically most plush and shag carpets will be beveled, as well as friezes. You can see in the picture below that we bevel a lot of carpet. The pile of carpet fiber is accrued throughout the day, multiple times a day. Is sweeping the warehouse annoying?! Yes. Is doing the proper job annoying?! Not in the slightest. This is why we are proud of our business name: Done With Precision Carpet Binding!
Pile of carpet fibers swept up: this is about a half-day's worth!


The next topic of conversation will be hand-binding. This is something we do for custom shaped pieces that have radii or multiple small cut out areas. If it were 90 degree angles, we could relief cut the carpet, bind or serge it as needed, than re-glue the carpet back together. However, when there is am interior radius, we have two options: hot-glue the base of the carpet fibers to prevent them from fraying over time or hand-bind. Hand-binding is a quite a process and is billed at an hourly figure. We recently had a job in here that had multiple areas that required hand-binding. The unfortunate side to hand-binding is the element of human error. Our machines stitch in the exact place with every stitch making a crisp clean line. When hand-binding you have to eye-ball where to staple the binding. This often translates into a little bit less of a crisp look. Hand-binding includes, stapling the binding in place, folding the binding over the carpet and hot-gluing it to the backing. It takes a bit of time because of the 3-steps it takes to complete.
Below are some examples of the most recent job requiring hand-binding:

Hand-binding; Interior Radius

Hand-binding: Interior Circle

Hand-binding: Interior Radius, horseshoe shaped.
 Although you can get a line of site with the first couple of staples, the curves in the carpet make it difficult to keep that line consistent throughout. Again, the biggest factor here is the human error element. Although we try to be as exacting as possible, it's not always perfect ... Hey, I didn't say we were "Done with Perfection Carpet Binding!" . [haha]

There you have it, beveling & hand-binding 101. 
We will be quizzing you on Monday! 


As always, we would like to say THANK YOU our customers who come in and see us. Without you, we wouldn't be here! Have a great weekend, everybody!
 

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

"They're Baaaaack."

Dear Ladies & Gentlemen,

DWP Carpet Binding is fully recovered from our destination wedding & back to business!!

Business Hours:
Monday - Friday
8 am - 4 pm


Sincerely,
The Team of DWP

Monday, April 2, 2012

CLOSING DATES:

Please note that DWP Carpet Binding will be closed for business

Thursday April 5th, 2012 - Monday April 9th, 2012

Regular business hours will resume on Tuesday April 10th, 2012.