New Hallway Carpet

New Hallway Carpet

We told you on Monday how our new carpet was being installed, so I wanted to show you what it looks like now!

I know that carpet isn’t really the “coolest” decorating trend. When you watch House Hunters everyone is always like, “ew, carpet.” But I have to be real honest: I kind of love it. I mean, I love our hardwood floors in the living areas, but they aren’t warm and comfy like good old fashioned wall-to-wall carpeting, you know what I mean? Walking from our bedroom to the bathroom down the hall with bare feet is pretty fantastic when there’s a squishy carpet underfoot instead of a hard wood floor, and heaven forbid you ever want to sit on a wood floor… ouch.

Before:

So, we have carpet in this one tiny little part of our house, the upstairs hallway. It was carpeted when we moved in with a berber, and you may remember that we were having a problem with one of the floorboards underneath popping when you’d walk on it, like it was a little mini seesaw under the carpet. We ripped up the carpet, fixed the floorboard, had some repairs done to the wall next to it that was seriously cracked, and then lived with it looking like this for three months (I’d say a month and a half of that was us trying to avoid spending that much money and the other month and a half was because the carpet got back ordered):

Ick. And as you can see, the floorboards in this hall were so not pretty, it wasn’t worth trying to refinish them. We would have had to replace almost every board. And that tape you see? That was there. Old houses are weird. New carpet was pretty much a necessity, which is nice because carpet is soft, but sucks because it’s also pricey.

We shopped around for new carpet at the two easiest places we know of and the places we spend most of our time and money: Home Depot and Lowe’s. Their prices were comparable, but we really liked that Lowe’s has a whole pet-friendly line of Stainmaster carpets. They have warranties against all kind of things that pets can (and will) do to a carpet, so that was perfect for us, with a puppy and two cats. (This isn’t sponsored at all, just letting you know what we decided!)

We ended up buying the Baxter line in a color called “Trixie.” (I think we chose Baxter III, which is their budget version, because we just don’t really care that much to spend extra money on such a small area, and honestly, I think it doesn’t look cheap at all in real life.) We debated between “Trixie” and “Doodle,” which are both shades of grey. HILARIOUS, you guys. Our cat is named Trixie. Our dog is a doodle. Andy’s brother’s dog is named Baxter. I didn’t look around much, but I can pretty much guarantee there was a “Mocha” somewhere too (our other cat). I mean, seriously, it’s sooo funny. We picked “Trixie” because it was a light, almost silvery grey, while “Doodle” is a tad darker.

So here it is now:

This new carpet is pretty awesome. And besides the whole luxury of walking to the bathroom with no socks on thing, which is amazing, it just looks so much cleaner and brighter. The grey is much better with our yellow walls than the tan, and also works really well with the rooms on the second floor — our bedroom, guest room, office and master bath.

I love the transition from the hallway to the bathroom:

And here’s Trixie telling Mocha that the carpet is actually named after her, and Mocha isn’t allowed on it EVER. Of course.

Trixie has the pinkest little tummy. It’s so funny. Also, sidenote, you can’t really tell in this highly unflattering photo of Trixie, but she’s actually really streamlined her figure over the last few months. I think she’s been working out.

And one last before/after shot because it makes me happy.

So that’s our upstairs hallway. I know it’s not the most exciting thing to read about, or super design-forward, so thanks for sticking around if you made it this far! Now I’m going to go run up and down the hall barefoot … just because I can!

What do you think: are you team carpet or team hardwoods everywhere?

— Kerry