Carpet, can we still be friends?

Look, I know. I don’t like carpet either.

Before we moved into our house we stripped all the carpet out of the bedrooms, refinished the wood floors and bought giant killim rugs from West Elm because I read the whole of Pinterest and learnt everything I needed to know about rug sizing and fitting all your furniture ON the rug not next to it.

Behold, a wooden floor and a bare staircase to the upper floor.

And yes, it is West Elm, for Pinterest deems West Elm to be acceptable

The rug is large; the floors are wood

But the thing is, now we are redoing the basement family room / guest room combo. And it has a cement floor, on top of which lies a fairly new; desperately unforgivable, grey carpet.

There’s nothing redeeming about it, other than it has provided a soft landing for our many children, all of whom have inherited their mother’s tendency to fall frequently and with no good reason.

So when we started thinking about the renovation, we wondered: new reclaimed flooring? Vinyl plank flooring? Polished concrete?

Best. holiday. ever. (X3)

Did I mention I like a bit of cement?

Contemplating whose turn it is for a trip to A&E

But cement is cold and would need underfloor heating and not only would that up the budget significantly, it would – crucially – turn this into a much lengthier project, and as this is the room I like to herd children into, multiple times through the day, I wasn’t willing to spend the extra months with it out of commission.

The closest I will get to polished cement floors in this house, our kitchen cement tiles

And cement really isn’t so great for the toddlers and crawling babies, especially in combination with a flight of stairs.

The shelves though, toddlers do like a nice set of shelves.

Mismatched wooden floors? – I wasn’t feeling too excited about that prospect either.

What about a jute-sisal option, I wondered – for about 30seconds whilst browsing Houzz – before I remembered an Airbnb we once stayed in that was carpeted entirely in sisal, looked amazing in the photographs, but that I dreaded placing my feet on every time we walked in the door.

Scratchy. (Image: Houzz)

Not. An. Option.

Your feet won’t thank you. Image: Pinterest

And so, we are left with carpet, and I found some Inspo images that didn’t make me feel like I had entirely stepped back to the 90s so perhaps there is still some hope:

Image: Pinterest

Image: Pinterest

Image: Pinterest (surprise!)

And then I found a new-to-me blog, Chris Loves Julia, who have redecorated their almost identical sized basement floor with what might be the perfect solution:

Looks like jute; feels like carpet (image: Chris Loves Julia)

You can even layer rugs on it for ultimate Pinterest Points (Image: Chris loves Julia)

And

Image: Chris loves Julia

And as an aside, she also makes sweaters that proclaim the wearer a Homebody so I think we can assume she’s my new best friend.

Image: Instagram @chrislovesjulia

The only problem remaining is sourcing this identical carpet on Vancouver Island.

A close-up in the hope that a carpet supplier on Vancouver Island will stumble across this blog and have this exact carpet in stock and ready to roll – yes that was a pun (Image: Chris Loves Julia)

Oh, and moving the contents of our storage crawl space that I talked Stephen into bringing out, so that I could ‘organise’ it ahead of the renovations starting in earnest. Sigh.

You can imagine what a fun weekend we’ve had chez tMatM.

Carpet! It’s happening. Please tell me all your carpet related tips. Many thanks.

Xx tMatM