New Carpet!!!

After months of looking and testing and thinking and questioning we finally picked a new carpet and ordered it. In just two short weeks it arrived from the factory and the carpet layers came to our home and in two long days (for the carpet layers), our old carpet was ripped out and our new carpet was installed. 

Our new carpet is a multi-color short pile frieze made with Smartstrand. We think it will hide stains better than our old ivory carpet. Of course, we also hope that we will be able to easily remove stains from our new carpet and not need to hide them. Frieze style carpets create an informal look and they hold up well (so we are told!) in high traffic areas. Our entire home is a high traffic area with ten occupants, five of them young children. Our old carpet was patterned cut and pile. It was elegant, but very stained by the prior owners of the house who had three young children and an old dog. We added our own layer of dirt over the past four years. Stain-wise it was a lousy carpet, but its texture retention (does it show crushing from foot traffic?) was amazing. 

Our new carpet feels wonderfully soft on bare feet. Lincoln likes to roll on it and Evan likes to grab handfuls of it. Bentley and Jake tell us that when they throw themselves down on it (doing gymnastics stunts or wrestling) it is not as well-padded as our old carpet. Cut and pile has more strands per square inch than frieze.

Our new carpet looks great. We're thrilled to have it installed. We are not as thrilled with all the work we have yet to do to get the house back in order after the painting and recarpeting. Because we had to move all the furniture to paint and then again to get new carpet laid, Kara and I decided it was a good opportunity to make changes. We sold bed sets, tables, chairs, couches, and night stands. We're changing out desks, bookshelves, and curtains. It's a massive project which has not been easy to work on with a newborn and a one year old who both need a lot of attention. It's been crazy and tempers have frayed, but the end of the project is in sight--not this month, but soon.

Our old carpet:

Our new carpet: