Carpet or Wood?

Hubby's arm is finally healed and we're back to the business of house-fixin'.   We didn't do much to the house over the summer but we did put in new carpeting in the living room.

Yay!  No more worn-out, crushed and stained carpeting!

We had been debating since we moved in on whether to put in carpet or wood flooring in the living room.   Wood flooring looks great but there's a comfort factor to carpet that is tough to beat.

While we were mired in our indecision, the existing carpeting, which was already bad when we bought the place, was getting worse and worse.  There were some HUGE stains in the dining area from the previous owners that even steam-cleaning and scrubbing with various chemicals wouldn't take out.

When some friends we hadn't seen in ten years wanted to visit this summer,  I decided replacing the carpeting was priority one.  We had less than two weeks before our company arrived.  There wasn't time to put in wood flooring.  It was even a scramble to find a place that could get carpeting ordered and installed that fast.  Luckily, the local flooring store where we had bought our kitchen flooring was able to do it in time.  The big hold-up in the process was, you guessed it, choosing a carpet.

I thought it'd be a no-brainer:  Go in.  Choose a color.  Do you want loop or non-loop?  Done.  Obviously, I had never bought carpet before.

We were more concerned with matching existing flooring
that would meet up with the carpet
than matching the walls, which I will probably
repaint at some point when I'm bored with the color.

I knew there were texture differences in carpet (aka berber vs. shag) but I didn't realize there were so many categories, different types of materials, backings and face weights.   After looking at our options, we chose a casual textured carpet, which wasn't quite as plush as I wanted but was very soft and not scratchy.  We also bought the more expensive waterproof pad.

I had intended on a basic beige carpet, perhaps with two different colors of beige threads.  But I couldn't find exactly what I wanted.  In the end, we went with a peppery colored carpet, Shaw's Down to Earth in Mixed Spice, which my husband was a little uneasy about since it's not very traditional.  For me, the main selling point was that it's supposedly good at hiding stains.  And it is!  (Actually, it's too good; our cat hurled up a hairball the other day and after I removed the gooey pile of fur, I had a hard time finding the stain so I could clean it.  I had to pat the carpet by hand to find where it was wet.  Ewww...)

Flecks of bright color sort of blend and fade
when you see the carpet as a whole

The weird thing about this multi-colored carpet is that from a distance you can't see all the colors.  It doesn't look like just one color, but you'd never guess there's yellow, red, blue and green threads in there, along with beiges and black, unless you get down and examine the threads closely.  It's definitely not a look for everyone but I think it'll be a good fit for our stain-prone family.

Anyhow, back to the install, the carpet was installed and mostly aired out by the time our guests arrived and I was so happy about that!

I've already had the...ahem...opportunity to clean spots from the carpet.  The latest was a Silly Putty incident, which I was able to get out of the carpet with some Goo Gone.  I was told that newer types of carpeting shouldn't be cleaned with detergent, just steam extraction, which means we'll really be putting our steam vac to the test.