Sharing a look at my new area rug that changed the look of my family room! Plus the good, the bad, and the ugly of my quest for the perfect rug.
Goodbye old, smelly shag rug!! Hello, beautiful wool!
When we moved into our home 16 years ago, my son was just a year old and my daughter wasn’t born. Our home came with hardwood floors throughout, so I needed an area rug that would be super soft and forgiving for little hands and knees.
Enter the shag rug…
What is Shag Carpet?
Shag carpet is a high-pile carpet with a twisted fiber. It is incredibly soft and plush and very forgiving to foot traffic. Perfect for little ones, right?
Well, yes and no. I loved how soft it was and truthfully, it hid a multitude of sins. It never showed pet hair, or Cheerio spills, or bands from their Rainbow Loom obsession, etc. Everything just got sucked down into the fibers like it was never there! So from a loose dirt perspective, it always looked clean!
BUT…and this is a big but, the fibers are so long that they are incredibly difficult to clean, even for a professional cleaning company. The dirt gets ground into the fibers and over time, the fibers discolor in the high-traffic areas. Also, all of those missing cheerios, pet hair, dust, etc. that hide in the long shag? Well, they’re still there! They’re just hard to find, even for the most powerful vacuum cleaner.
So the shag carpet was dirty, really dirty.
I wanted….no make that needed…a new rug about 8 years ago but mine is a 12×15 custom rug, so it’s expensive to replace and always fell to the bottom of my priority list. Until now!
Choosing a New Rug
I weighed all of the considerations, styles, and fiber options for buying a rug, and settled on a nylon, diamond pattern rug. It was very inexpensive compared to other carpets and perhaps not one I love loved (my mistake), but it was a good, practical choice for my home with two teens, two dogs, and a cat.
But there was a problem…
When the rug arrived, it was quite a different color than the sample the manufacturer had sent me! Instead of a beautiful beige, it had a slight pink undertone that I HATED.
As it turned out, it was more than the 5% standard variance and thankfully, the manufacturer agreed to take it back and the flooring store agreed to refund me my money and let me choose again. Whew!
I lived with this first rug for a while while I worked to find another option. You might have caught a glimpse of this first in a recent Amazon post about my Dyson…
After many months of trips to my local Carpet One (we joked that I was a volunteer employee since I spent so much time there), samples, and cuttings, I chose a beautiful loop wool rug.
A cutting is a sample of the carpet from the current loom. So it is literally a piece of the actual carpet you would get if you were to purchase. This is different than a sample, which is a piece of the carpet but it might not be from the current loom, so the color or pattern might be slightly different.
Nature’s Carpet – Ambrosia – Oatmeal
My new area rug is a 100% wool loop carpet from Nature’s Carpet. The style is called Ambrosia and I chose a color called Oatmeal.
Let me tell you, I LOVE this new rug! It’s soft and beautiful and just the look I was hoping for.
The color is a warm beige and I love that the heavy texture is reminiscent of sisal, but soft and warm, unlike sisal.
Wool is incredibly durable and great for high-traffic areas. But is it right for my home where kids still spill fruit punch? Probably not. But I’m optimistic!
Hello, giant cat scratching post!
Despite the potential issues in the future, I’m thrilled with my new custom area rug. Really, I couldn’t wait to say goodbye to the smelly shag rug and now wish I had done it sooner!
Next up for this room is a fresh coat of paint. And coming soon, I’ll have a complete guide for you on how to make a custom rug, for when a standard rug just won’t do!
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