Carpets!

The arrival of carpets in our house seems to have been a long, long time coming.

Basically it is the very last thing you can install during a renovation (apart from unfixed soft furnishings).  This is because obviously, you don't want to be dripping paint on a lovely new carpet or having builders trampling all over it.
So... our journey (hate that word - subverted by TV weight loss shows - but it seems appropriate in this context) to carpets was:

- Strip carpets (2010)



- Strip horrible office-style ceilings (2011)



- Re-gib ceilings (2011)



- Plaster and re-cove ceilings (2011)



- Repaint rooms (2011-2013)



So... the above done we could move onto carpets.  We were advised to go with nylon as it lasts better than wool and won't stain (we'll see!!!).  So despite being in the country of wool - nylon it was.

The hall, ensuite, laundry and kitchen diner will stay as floorboards and the bathroom is tiled.  So we had three rooms to be carpeted - the two bedrooms and the second lounge/bedroom.  Each room is around 4m * 5m so pretty big, and the total quote, for a mid-range quality carpet and top range underlay was $4,000.  This was about $500 cheaper than the next best quote though still a sizeable whack.

The big day arrived!  I had built up lots of TOIL so took the day off to shift the furniture around ahead of the carpet fitters.  It was exhausting.  Not only was there obviously a lot of lifting but because all of the shifted furniture had to go somewhere (the kitchen diner) there was literally nowhere to sit down all day.  Not a bed, not a sofa, and the chairs were all covered in clothes (the wardrobe in the bedroom was also carpeted so we had to take the clothes out).

Here's the before shot showing the kind of flooring we had.

The floors looked like this before - painted brown, paint speckles

 We had problems in each room - the old hearths were made of tiles and we wanted to keep them, but because they were raised higher than the floorboards the fitters filled the area to make the ramp less well-rampy.

What they did to the old tiles to flatten it out.  Still under there - just

luxury underlay

underlaid

We had to take off the doors in several of the rooms, including the closet.

carpeting the bedroom.  Check out the awesome flow into the closet

Finished product - front room

Loving the carpet

The final job was to get in a "guy" to plane off the doors we had to remove to fit the carpets and rehang them.  That cost us another $350.  But included the two bifold doors on the wardrobes.

Verdict - we are loving the carpets.  A bonus is that the rooms look clean.  We could never make them look clean with the paint spattered floorboards, even if they had been multiply mopped.  Only trouble is that now the furniture doesn't look good enough!  Hmmm.  more expense to come...