Playroom Under Construction

12 Comments

Posted by Rebecca, November 27th, 2012

Has it seriously been 2 months since we started looking for a playroom carpet? We didn’t plan on waiting this long (we wanted it done for Thanksgiving), but some things happened and we ended up ordering it much later than planned. But the moral of the story is… we ordered a playroom carpet!!

Need a refresher? The playroom is actually our former office that is downstairs with the striped walls and french doors.

Thanks to that little cat, who ironically photobombed this picture, we have to completely scrap this carpet. Darwin was diagnosed with kidney cancer last year and had a few very, very rough months that included… peeing on our carpets. We tore up the family room carpet this spring and now it’s time for this one to go.

(For those of you wanting a Darwin update, he is doing amazing. He was the first cat with renal lymphoma that his oncologist has ever treated to live past 6 months. It’s just an awful form of cancer for cats that essentially causes kidney failure even if chemo is suppressing the cancer. Darwin beat the odds and has since made it to a year post-diagnosis. Though he does suffer from some loss of kidney function, cats can actually live normal lives with something ridiculous like 75% of their kidney function lost. He has been off chemo for almost a year now!)

A few weeks ago I discovered Mohawk’s SmartStrand carpet, which is eco-friendly and you can clean it with just soap and water. We looked around some major retailers, but we didn’t see anything that you could clean with just soap and water. So after being frustrated that Easton had no where to roll free (though he has carpet in his room), we realized that we really need to choose something. I am generally a pretty decisive person, so we headed to Lowe’s all set to choose something. And choose we did.

So we trekked up to the salesperson, with this board and baby in hand and were like, “okay, we’ll take it”. That guy made the easiest commission ever. We wanted Lowe’s to install it (what the heck do we know about stapling carpets??), but we didn’t know that regardless of if we had the measurements on hand, they still had to send someone out fo measure. Whaaamp whaamp. So they wrote down what carpet we wanted and took our information. Then we had to wait to hear from the installer.

He called us within a day or so and scheduled a measurement for a few days away. He came, confirmed our measurements and called them into Lowe’s. Lowe’s then called us and told us the price and that we just had to come in to pay, yay! Except they lied. Mike got there and they needed all of the carpet information again, which is how I have the above picture. Since I was carrying Easton and whatnot, I trusted that Lowe’s was recording what I was choosing and didn’t take any pictures the day we selected it. Thankfully my memory is ridiculous and I remembered the style name, so I asked Mike to send a picture of the board because I knew the position of the color we wanted.

So we went with the SmartStrand Preston in Sugared Bronze with the recommended carpet pad. Using the SmartStrand pad protects the warranty and was seriously something like 10 cents more a square foot. Our room is incredibly small so it was something like $15 for the better pad. Sold!

Here is where I would normally give you pictures of the carpet I found while googling… but I can’t find any. My google-age (new word) has led me to believe that the big box stores like Lowe’s and Home Depot carry their own lines of SmartStrand carpet. Quite like mattresses, this makes it impossible to compare across retailers. So I’m guessing that my Preston is someone else’s Harrison and someone else’s Mason. My sugared bronze is someone elses shimmer metallic brown. It has to be in limited availability to have no history on the internet. Bizarre.

Anyway, we really just guessed what color would look best. We knew the paint color of the stripes in the new playroom has a tinge of brown to it. A bluish gray wouldn’t go as well as one with more of a taupe undertone. From there we just picked a mid-tone color that wasn’t too dark or too light.

As for the style of the carpet, we petted the larger samples to see how each one would feel on little knees. Then we compared prices and weighed the pros and cons. For example, our room is between 100-150 square feet, so we knew if the prices differed by a small amount, we would just go with the nicer one. A 20 cent price difference wasn’t making a big dent in the budget if it meant we were getting a more dense carpet. Using that method, we went with a mid-range carpet that was the best in it’s group. So it’s like the upper middle class of carpets.

We were told that the carpet would take only 2-3 weeks to come in, since the room is so small and the manufacturer should have enough on hand. We ordered it about a week and a half ago, so we’re hoping to hear from the installer soon. We were told that the whole room would take them less than an hour to do. I can’t wait 🙂

ps- Am I the only one that manages to kill an entire sleeve of crackers each time I open one? One blog post = a sleeve of saltines gone. Whoops.

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12 Responses to “Playroom Under Construction”

  1. Jane says:

    Cannot wait to see the final results of the playroom, already love the stripes and french doors. And FYI, Lowes employees do not receive commission. They took that away from us almost two years ago. 🙁

    • Rebecca says:

      Oh noo! That is awful! There still have to be some sort of incentives right? When I worked in retail a good 6 years ago we got say $20 for x amount of sales or credit cards opened. I can’t even remember the details because usually the numbers were only reached by people who worked a lot of hours.

      • Jane says:

        Nope. Just hourly rates. 🙁 They killed all commission, credit card sale bonus’s, holiday bonus’s, and inventory bonus’s in the last couple of years. Really takes away the motivation to sell sometimes. The economy dump nailed retail pretty hard I guess. Most people don’t realize there’s no commission anymore and expect us to bend over backwards for their ridiculous demands! lol. Such is retail.

  2. Hooray for new carpet! Can’t wait to see it!

  3. Kerri says:

    I love your blogand your Eco friendly choices! I’m interested to know if you are happy with your decision to go with the Naturepedic crib mattress. I love what I’ve read and my only hesitation is the waterproof cover… I’d prefer it just be quilted and use a pad.
    Did you end out getting the no compromise 150?

    • Rebecca says:

      Hi Kerri!

      We went with the Naturepedic Organic Cotton Plus mattress from Buy Buy Baby. It’s impossible to compare models, but we went up a level from our original foam Naturepedic choice (which was the cheapest) and went with a 150 coil one with an infant and toddler side. It was slightly more than a similar one on Amazon, but we used a 20% off coupon so it ended up costing the same. So far it’s been great and Easton has slept like a champ on it since he was about 8 weeks old. We have the Naturepedic changing pad too and it’s great (and thankfully wipes down easily…)

  4. Gabbi says:

    I love the color you chose…it looks so pretty! I can’t wait to see it installed. I hope you guys hear back ASAP and have a pain-free installation! 🙂

  5. I think it looks fantastic- going to do it this summer!! genuine article

  6. Emily says:

    This is an absolutely ADORABLE playroom! I love everything about it. Thanks for sharing!
    Emily recently posted..Aluminium Fabrication and the processes

  7. Graysonau says:

    Plantation shutters always have a real look on the property with a selection of material varieties ranging from real wood, PVC to synthetic wood materials providing superior quality compared to other shutters and especially good when sourced from Australian Window Covering, Victoria.
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  8. PaintNumbers says:

    He was the first cat with renal lymphoma that his oncologist has ever treated to live past 6 months.

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