Laying carpet seems like a simple enough thing, right? You move a little furniture, roll out padding, roll out carpet, and put the furniture back. Simple. Well, I don’t do simple. See my grandparents had a wood burning stove that wasn’t set up correctly when this was their house and because of that our ceilings were stained and covered with soot. Well, actually when we moved in everything was but we had cleaned and painted everything but the ceilings. I decided while the furniture was out of the living room we should paint the ceiling. Since our living room is fairly large I had divided into a living area and a dining area. However, with carpet in the living room I decided I was going to have to move my school room into the living room and move my dining set back into the dining room. So, a one day job became a four day job.

Then I don’t know if I mentioned this but this is gently used carpet given to us by and older couple so we didn’t exactly go out and buy just the right measured amount for our living room. The end result was that we didn’t have enough for every inch of the room. So we have a hallway from our front door to our back door. This in the end turns out perfect, because now all three doors coming from the outside come in on linoleum before you ever step on the carpet. We still have to go get some new linoleum (our current flooring is 20 years old, doesn’t match anything in the room and is u-g-l-y) and we need to get a long transition bar from where the carpet goes to linoleum. I used some of the left over pieces of carpet to make a rug in front of each door and used double sided tape to hold them in place. My biggest concern was that I always sweep up so much sand and dog hair and now it’s going to be all in the carpet… Well, as I’m behind on blogging about this the carpet has been down a week and a half. I vacuum it daily. I know I’ll slack off when the newness wears off but oh well. Oddly enough all the floors seem to be staying cleaner, less sandy, etc. I think the little mats by each door are making a world of difference. Who knew it could be so easily solved?

The dining room looks so nice as an actual dining room. We had stopped eating as a family at the table together every night, but have reinstated that tradition since the change. It has been really nice. I was also really surprised by how homey-er the living room looks with carpet. But the biggest surprise is that we’ve always just used the school room to hold our school supplies but now it is actually functional and we use it every day.

Our FREE carpet ended up costing us supply money to get it laid, plus we paid a neighbor to show Cecil how to lay carpet, then the paint that I added in, then we still have to buy new linoleum to match, BUT I think it has made many well worth it improvements to our house and family.