Fresh, New Carpet

Don't you just love to wiggle your toes into fresh, plush carpet? It's nearly as nice as wiggling your toes in the sand on a hot, sunny day... Okay, maybe that's a stretch, but when you spend four hours actually laying the carpet yourself, it sure feels nice to enjoy your hard work.

Yes, I laid the carpet myself. Along with my awesome dad, who brought his muscles over to help me position the ginormous roll of mocha frieze. (Which, can I just take a moment to mention that it's nearly impossible to move carpet? Seriously, every time we needed to move the roll half an inch, we over pushed it 20 times before it landed where we wanted it.)

It's pretty hard work but we were fortunate enough that we didn't need to pull up old hard flooring and we are on a concrete subfloor so we used glue instead of tack-strips. And since we choose a carpet with foam back, we didn't need to do any stretching.

Speaking of the old floor, here's a glimpse at what that looked like...

We always knew we wanted to change it because it just wasn't our taste. This kind of tile (known as VCT in the construction world) has to be stripped and waxed up to two times a year, plus regular maintenance. We wanted the room to feel cozy, especially when we use that fireplace this fall and winter.

I absolutely love simple home projects. Laying that carpet only took half of a Saturday, and I've already used the room three times as much as I did before. That makes the hard work so worth it.

Also, so sorry for the crappy photos. This room gets so much natural light, it's really hard to get get a decent photo.