We put our living room carpet out of its misery and put down hardwoods. I don't know why, because our carpet was easily the coolest in the neighborhood. I haven't seen inside every neighbor's home, but I'm guessing no one else had chichi beige carpet with DIY orange polka dots (the polka dots = cat vomit, but I did say it was DIY).
Now we have nice dark floors, and everything is in the swim, but we need an area rug because the ottoman slides around the floor when we prop our feet on the thing.
I naively assumed rug shopping would be easy. We want a rug with some color, but it has to look ok with our light blue furniture. On the color wheel of contrasts, I'm looking at yellows and oranges. As you might imagine yellow and/or orange rugs are grotesque. To complicate matters, we are looking for size 6X9, which limits our selection to the valley of the most heinous (5X8 and 8X10 seem to be the cool kids) area rugs ever created.
After an exhaustive search online, and some of the big box stores, Poseidon and I stopped by a local rug and carpeting gallery last month. The salesperson was helpful, warm and friendly, but her, "You should think of an area rug as an investment" line hurt my head because I knew an area rug from her store was going to punch my wallet in the nose. An investment? An area rug in our home is going to be a place where cat vomit goes to die, while keeping the ottoman from sliding into the fireplace.
The rug search is still on, and I've viewed so many rug samples online that they appear in my dreams at night. I've had to take long breaks from looking, simply to keep my sanity in check.
Not only are we still rugless, we apparently aren't properly diversified. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds and area rugs seem to be the way to go.
--Amphitrite
