We’ve had quite the journey with rugs in this house. Since moving in, we have now gone through three (I think it’s three anyway) rugs in just the dining room alone. I just don’t have very good luck with them.
Rug #1
The first one was a temporary hand-me-down the Hubs got from his mom right after he moved into the house three years ago. I don’t even have a picture of it, but it it was ugly—black or brown with this awful floral pattern. I wasn’t sad to see that one go.
Rug #2
Then six months later Tim surprised me with a rug I had been eyeing from Pottery Barn. I came back from visiting my family in Nebraska for a weekend and there was a new rug under the table (along with a demo’d basement.) It was great! The rug is actually much lighter in person than what the picture shows.
And then I thought Nellie was old enough to roam the house freely, and came home from work one day to find an entire corner of it had been chewed up and was basically missing. So that brought us to…
Rug #3
I didn’t waste much time after rug #2 was chewed up to pick out a new one. I wanted to keep with a similar, neutral rug since the one in the living room had the color and pattern. So last summer, I was wasting time and stopped into Pottery Barn and once again found a rug I liked. Bigger bonus that it was on sale! I actually ended up liking this one even more than the previous one.
So for the past 9 or 10 months, this is what the dining room has looked like with that rug (the walls did get painted sometime in there.)
Fast forward to today after muddy feet and paws and the cat throwing up hairballs on that beloved rug, this is what it looked like: (it’s a bit hard to see in the picture, but in person, the stains stood out.)
It needed to go, and it’s once again time to replace the dining room rug. I’m more frustrated with this one than before because I had asked the people at Pottery Barn about cleaning it and how easy it was to care for. I feel like I got let down. The rug would stain almost immediately after something had touched it, resulting in a discoloration. And perhaps it was the products I used to try and clean it. Either way, I felt like it did not stand up to the quality of the Pottery Barn brand and that the sales people had led me on (or just didn’t know their stuff.)
So this time around, I’ve decided that I’m going to invest in an indoor-outdoor rug, and actually already have one picked out from Dash and Albert.
I don’t want to give up on my yearning of having a light colored rug in the dining room, so when I read this about the rug: “Regular vacuuming and the occasional gentle shake should keep your rug in shipshape condition. All polypropylene area rugs are hoseable, scrubbable, and bleachable.” I was sold. Not to mention, I LOVE the diamond pattern.
Bleach the spot where the cat has just hawked up a hair ball? No problem! Hose it off after someone or the dog tracks in mud? Sounds great!
But since we still need to buy a new guest bed and a headboard, the dining room will just look like this for now:
Whomp. Whomp. The .5 in the title is because a fourth rug hasn’t been purchased. Get it? Yeah….
But actually I don’t mind it so much. It’s easy to sweep under and one less thing to vacuum. Maybe if I like this no rug thing enough, I may not end up getting another one at all.
—m.