Sundayland: Carpet.

Wednesday, with 24 hours to go for our carpet instal: all I could think was that we had bitten off more than we could chew. Actually, I started thinking that the night before, but whatever. It's not that ripping up carpet is especially difficult (not easy or fun) but... We've spent two months unpacking and settling things into place, and then we had to haul it all out again. Little things- like we had to empty out my fabric cupboard, full of neatly folded and organised fabric, arranged just so. Everything in Willows room had to be washed or sunned to make sure no fleas hung around.

So I guess it kinda sucked for the morale.

Anyways. Wednesday night, m was supposed to finish a 12 hour shift, then we were going to move our heavy ensemble bed, rip up the carpet in our room and he was going to finish the trim in the spare room, before carpet went down. Brutal.

Just after lunch on Wednesday, we got a phone call to say that when they rolled out our carpet to cut it into room sizes, they found it was covered in grease or oil. I asked how salvageable it was- like, if they knocked the price down, it wouldn't be so bad if the grease spots were under a bed or something, right? But the majority of the marks were 60cm-100cm from the edge- so they would have been towards the middle of the rooms. This place doesn't keep carpet instore normally- they order it as they need it. Which makes sense for several reasons, but it made things rather tricky for us. The lovely carpet people promised to see what they could do and call me back.

Left, our original choice. Right, the substitute.

They offered us a similar carpet- it was about $10pm more (but they would absorb that cost). They has enough of the darker carpet to do all three rooms, but they were unsure of the lighter one. Since two of the three rooms don't get a lot of natural light, I decided to go lighter. (Now I'm kicking myself. One should always pick the darker options for flooring, shouldn't they...) It turns out they had enough for two rooms, and would have to order in some more for one more room...

Little sample is our original colour, background is the lighter substitute.

... Which actually ended up working out really well for us. It meant that m didn't have to come home after 12 hours to rip out carpet. It meant I wasn't getting up early on Thursday to remove all the staple and tacks from the floorboard, before cleaning it, before the installers arrived. All m had to do was paint the skirting board in the spare room, and we had two freshly painted rooms, utterly perfect and ready for new carpet. The extra week while we wait on some more carpet meant we now have time to paint our master bedroom and replace the manky skirting boards, rather than trying to do it later, around the new carpet.

And so, this afternoon....