We Got Carpet, But Saved Our Hardwoods
So, this isn't a very glamorous post, but a while back, I mentioned on Instagram that we got carpet for our home. Several people showed interest in hearing about this, so I'm here to oblige! The kicker was that we didn't want to ruin the beautiful hardwoods underneath with a bunch of nails, so we opted for rugs.
However, I wanted wall-to wall carpet for our bedroom and the nursery - I'm a carpet person, what can I say?! Plus, if I'm being honest, I really don't care for most area rugs and they are often overpriced in my opinion, for not that great of quality. I wanted real carpet that would have a serious will to live amongst a large dog and a baby. This would have been really hard to find amidst regular area rugs (with super specific dimensions and so on), so we decided we'd try the "custom rug" route.
The problem that arises from that choice, of course, is cost.
Or is it a problem...?
That's when Tom started to hunt around.
We wanted wall-to-wall custom rugs for two bedrooms and nearly wall-to-wall in our living room, plus padding. What makes them "custom area rugs" are the finished edges and specified dimensions.
We live in Tennessee, but between Nashville and Atlanta are the big carpet manufacturers, such as Mohawk and Shaw. These feed into stores like Home Depot or even your local carpet-only businesses. We used to pass by their huge warehouses on our way up north, so when Tom remembered they were there, he looked for some companies near them that might work with us, and landed on Myers Carpet of Dalton. Honestly, Tom should really write this post, because he did all the corresponding and ordering, but I'll do my best - haha!
He got in touch with them and had a few conversations with a sales rep about what we were looking for in terms of needs (durable, pet friendly, easy to care for), material (we wanted Nylon for the reasons mentioned a second ago), color (neutral speckled grey), and pile/weight (our last house had such cheap carpet, and we wanted something more luxurious and that wouldn't mat quickly). Most, if not all, of the companies in that area have terrible websites with no pricing, poor filtering of options, and what looks like a limited selection. I'm sure if you know your carpet lingo and have the brands memorized, you'd have a breeze browsing them, but for the carpet novice, they're a bit... crappy.
However, it turns out that they are that way because these stores don't actually have real restrictions on inventory or options. The guy that Tom talked to let him know that if we could find a carpet type/color/weight/company, it would 9 times out of ten be manufactured just down the road from their office. They don't have prices online, because they sell mainly to the carpet stores you have in town, and have to keep that info under wraps for the sake of competition. When we first heard their price quotes for the same types of material we'd been looking at in Home Depot and the other stores, we thought it was a mistake. Basically, the places in Dalton Georgia don't compete with Home Depot, they sell to Home Depot, who then puts their own profit on top of it. The price we'd be paying from them was almost half of what we had expected to find elsewhere because we could cut out the middle man.
Once we'd figured that out, they shipped us a handful of small samples to look over based off of some pictures that the sales rep had texted to us - free of charge.
We took 24 hours to look at each of the samples in all the rooms we wanted them in, and in different light, and easily made our choice.
Then we measured each room's exact dimensions about four times to be positive, and sent our dimensions off to our contact with the sample name we liked and the margin we wanted them to stay at. We wanted a close fit so we asked for only a 1/2" margin from the wall to the edge of the carpet. With that all in hand, we placed our order.
After a few days, Tom got a phone call from the sales rep and found out that they would be out of the exact pile and weight of the carpet we'd chosen. So as not to wait, we chose to go with an even higher pile material, because we fancy, yes, but also because it would only end up adding about $.15 a square foot. Gotta give those toes some luxe.
Was it the most effortless process? No. Were we totally convinced that everything would come out 100% as we'd hoped? No. The phone/text/email back and forth was a little convoluted and drawn out, but our rep, Madison, did a great job keeping us in the loop about where were in the manufacturing process, even going as far as to call Tom a few times to chat with the people actually cutting our carpet to make sure everything was correct.
The shipping also was a bit of a waiting period, but as they make rugs for a lot of different businesses, we had to wait until the Nashville delivery truck was full until our carpet could be sent. This made the shipping much cheaper though, so we didn't sweat it.
Once it was sent to a carpet store in Nashville, that place called us up and set up a delivery time. Tom talked to the rep at that store, and it turned out that our white-glove delivery price was about half of what it would have been had we gone straight with them. It ended up costing a little more than what we had been quoted by the manufacturer, but it was still much less than we'd have paid otherwise.
And guys...
It feels AMAZING. Literally the thickest carpet we've ever had. So thick that Tom has to vacuum for me because our vacuum can barely get through it. Not because it's tall, but because it's just... so..... dense. I never realized how much I inadvertently cringed each night when I'd roll out of bed to use the bathroom in the night and touch the cold hardwood. The first night we had the carpet, I actually smiled in the dark because I felt so quiet and cozy! Anyways, yeah, everyone under this roof is pretty dang thrilled about it... including Hondo, who is glad to not be sliding from room to room. But I'm happy to expand on it more in a message if you wanted more detail on anything!
To recap:
We ordered (nearly) wall-to-wall carpet for three rooms, using custom dimensions, high pile/high quality Nylon material, with finished edges, fast turn-around, white glove delivery and install (meaning, they moved all of our furniture and laid it), padding, and no sales tax (because it was out of state) all for....
$1,730
Now you might think this sounds steep, but take into account that the particular carpet we chose would have cost upwards of $8.50 per square foot from anywhere else. That's just the carpet. We got EVERYTHING listed above for around $5.50 per square foot.
Oh and if you saw this awesome barn door hardware on my Instagram this past week, we got it from Wikibuy which is a website and Chrome extension that finds you the best prices online! This was gifted to me, but I love using their site. We had been dying to get a sliding door put in, because our master is small and we wanted to remove the area a swinging door took up. We are SO glad to have it!
