Extravagances

When spending large sums of money is a possibility, I tend to dither for long periods unless it's an emergency. This partly explains why we put up with carpet that smelt faintly of urine for three years (not sure how it happened, but the previous owners seemed to have had an accident at some point). Finally, however, we bit the bullet and indulged in some slightly more sensible carpet that has already proved its worth (an entire cup of coffee was spilt on it and you can't tell where it went now thanks to stain proofing and the chocolate brown colour). Here are some photos of the progress....

Our living room after lifting the old carpet. Note the lovely chipboard and paint spatters everywhere. I was glad we hadn't decided to go for a polished timber floor!

New lovely chocolate carpet, complete with badly arranged furniture. 

Carpet texture - the close-up camera shot washed out the colour quite a bit, but you can see the pattern. It's a loop-pile solution-dyed nylon, which is quite soft and apparently able to withstand a half-strength bleach solution (not that we're keen to test it out just yet!).

These photos were from stage one, where we covered the living area and master bedroom. Stage two involved covering all the other rooms: meeting room, study, kids' bedrooms (which was just completed this week). To save some money, my husband and I moved all the furniture ourselves (well, he did most of the grunt work - love you honey!). We're still working out where to put some of the junk we unnecessarily hoarded (you never know when you might need it...).

It ended up being a slightly more expensive process than previously planned, as the move was too much change for my dusty old PC to cope with. RIP Acer. It was the second time in 18 months that the motherboard died, and I was very grateful for the automated backup system we have in place. I highly recommend Maxtor storage drives. I don't highly recommend Acer tower PCs. Anyone need a monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers?