life and puppies

I’ve been trying to figure out a rug solution for our front living room for months. I wanted something cheerful because it’s the first full room you really see when you walk in the house, and the first thing we see when we come down the stairs in the morning. I thought I wanted yellow, but I worried I was really overdoing the pops of yellow in the rest of the house and turning the house into a sunshine zone. I wanted something inexpensive for obvious reasons, but also because it’s my experience that we are a family that is somewhat abusive to our rugs. I don’t think it verges on criminal or anything, but we probably deserve a warning or two. And, with a puppy in our new future, I didn’t see us improving on that front any time soon. So, after looking at nearly every rug on Overstock, One King’s Lane, Joss & Main, Wayfair, Crate & Barrel, West Elm, CB2, Pottery Barn, etc., I was stumped. Then, I started looking at the Flor carpet tiles. I was intrigued, but did not love the pricing. Basically, if I loved a rug, it was somewhere north of $500. Most of the rugs I found that I liked, I was more tolerant of than truly into. I placed dozens of rugs in my online shopping carts over the months. I nearly pulled the trigger on several. Finally, though, it was the combo of a 15% off coupon, $4.95 flat fee shipping and a color that matched our pillows that led me to buy the carpet tiles from CB2. At $7.95 a pop, paired with the coupon, let me get an 8×10 rug for about $237. Hooray! You can imagine my excitement when I came home to the tiles last night and set out to put the rug together today! And then what happened? Oy vey. It’s not an ideal story.

First, I realized that somehow I ordered three more of the swoon color, and three fewer of the heather gray, tiles than I had intended. So, my pattern was going to be different than I had pictured. Second, the rug gripper that is sold to use with the carpet tiles is just not that great nor is it easy to use. In addition, I don’t think I ordered enough of the sticky gripper, but I didn’t see any amount recommended on CB2’s website. I’ll be ordering more.

Ok, so I started out by moving the furniture, vacuuming the floor and setting the tiles in the pattern I wanted (well, Plan B of the pattern I wanted). Then I flipped them over, cut the rug gripper and began to attach it to corners and other seams of the squares.

Here is a close-up of this fascinating process.

It was at about this point that I realized that I did not have enough rug gripper tape and I had to stop doling it out like it was growing on trees. As you can see from this next picture, the right side of the rug did not fare as well in Rug Gripper Wars.

You see all that yellow? All of that is called, in the rug gripper world – of which I am now an esteemed member – ‘liner’ and it needs to be removed. And this is a process that is, for lack of a better phrase, a total pain. At this point, I solicited AO’s help. I really shouldn’t be the one having all the fun. So, we set in to remove all of that liner and that’s what we did. Even if it meant taking off the rug gripper that I had just worked so hard to put down and secure in place. That liner had to be removed! Ok, so after that step was over, we realized we were now going to have to flip this rug over. I sort of thought we should do this in the same way one removes a band-aid: fast and without over-thinking it. It turns out, though, we just aren’t nearly fast enough. AO had barely raised his end to knee-height when the rug started to fall apart. So, we essentially needed to start over. We flipped most squares individually, though a foursome stayed sweetly together, and put it together with the rug part facing up. In the end, we got this number:

I’m pretty pleased. It was supposed to be just two stripes, but this isn’t too bad.

I was hoping the little T-bar design would be hidden by the couch, but I don’t really mind it. I assume it will make people ask (I hope only to themselves), “What on earth was she thinking?”

This view kinda makes a cool cross, or plus-sign design, in my opinion. My opinion that it’s cool. I think it’s probably undisputed that it is a cross or plus-sign.

And one more view for you to marinate on. Once we get rid of the house’s inappropriate, omnipresent beige, I really think we’ll all feel better about things.