Few remodeling milestones are as gratifying as the day wall-to-wall carpeting is rolled out and stretched into place. Within a few hours, a bedroom awakens with color and style, a living room radiates warmth and luxury, or a family room grows cozy and comfortable.

According to the Carpet and Rug Institute (CRI), more than 6 out of 10 American homeowners prefer wall-to-wall carpeting over other flooring for those spaces. To meet that level of demand, over 2 billion square yards of carpet will be produced this year--enough to run a 12-foot wide swath around the Earth's equator twelve times.

Why the popularity? Carpet's benefits are obvious: it is comfortable, sound-deadening, warm, relatively affordable, quick to install, available in thousands of colors and styles, and can unify a home's interior.

A close look reveals that carpeting is like a heavy fabric made from face yarns and backing. Most carpets today are tufted on huge machines that stitch face yarn to a synthetic backing with hundreds of high-speed needles working simultaneously. Once completely stitched, the backing is usually coated with latex adhesive and reinforced with a second backing of jute, polypropylene, urethane foam, or rubber. Depending upon how the face yarns are finished, the carpet may be a loop carpet, cut pile, cut loop, or tip-sheared.

Face yarns are made from both synthetic fibers and natural wool. Wool is generally considered to be the ultimate fiber, though it costs two to three times the price of synthetics. It's particularly durable and natural in appearance.

Synthetic fibers are made from several materials. Though these are given trade names, generically they are either nylon, olefin, polyester, or acrylic. Nylon is the most popular because of its durability. Olefin is an easy-care material that's used outdoors and in basements. Polyesters are softer but a bit less durable than nylon. Acrylics resemble wool more than other fibers, resist static electricity and fading, but are more expensive.

Carpeting is applied over padding most of the time. Dense (not necessarily thick) padding prolongs carpet life, reduces noise, and cushions the floor.

Before a carpet is laid, tackless stripping, also called "tack strips" for short are nailed around the perimeter of the floor. These thin strips of wood have short tack points that stick upward to grab onto the carpet's backing. One edge of the carpet is hooked onto the protruding points of the stripping, and then the carpeting is stretched tight, hooked onto the tackless strips at the opposite wall, and trimmed. Seams between widths are joined from behind with fiberglass adhesive seaming tape or a thermal plastic seam tape that is applied with a special iron.