Carpet vs. Hardwood in Bedrooms

joanne said:

So my side of the bed has mats, which of course are great slip hazards.

Joanne - PLEASE get non-skid under-pads or backing for your mats!  I recently had an accident as a result of stepping onto a rug without a nonskid backing and had to have stitches and probably had a mild concussion as a result.  I'm fine now, but I was lucky.

sac said:

joanne said:

So my side of the bed has mats, which of course are great slip hazards.

Joanne - PLEASE get non-skid under-pads or backing for your mats!  I recently had an accident as a result of stepping onto a rug without a nonskid backing and had to have stitches and probably had a mild concussion as a result.  I'm fine now, but I was lucky.

 OUCH! I'm glad you are OK, SAC. Joanne, please fix your skidding problem! The last thing you need is to fall and whack your head!

That flooring looks great Peggy!

Sac, the kind of mat I have is a supposedly nonslip mat for tiled areas. However nothing will really grip on the flooring our landlord has installed, and he won't change. 'S alright: we're talking about moving, if we find something nicer/cheaper. The smokers around us are driving me batty.

Good luck with the search. Sounds like the place you are in could definitely be improved on... but you (and I) will miss the birds, won't we?

My birds seem to follow me...  

joanne said:

My birds seem to follow me...  

 Heh. Hope mine follow me. I'm gonna miss the goldfinches, the cardinals, and the woodpeckers. Not to mention the turkeys and the occasional indigo bunting or rose-breasted grosbeak. AND the nuthatches, chickadees, and tufted titmice!

But you're only going a little way up the road, in effect - are the birds so different over there?? Or the place more built- up?

Nah. The birds should be very similar. My only real question is whether they want to hang out near the house. We are in a veritable sanctuary in our current house, with no other visible neighbors and thick woods all around us. The birds love it. The new house must have been built on farm land next to a wooded pond, because our plot has almost no trees, except for the giant willow and some other specimen trees. We can see plenty of huge pines, maples, and oaks from our windows, but they are not really close to the house. It will be interesting to see what kind of wildlife we get.

But even if they don't come to the house, I expect I will be down at the pond very often, for walks and photo hikes, so I'll see the wildlife that hangs out there. 

Do you put out feeders?  If so, they will probably come to you.

Oh, yes. We have three hanging feeders at this house, plus a platform feeder on a tall post and a few hanging suet cages. Most of those will come with us. The only permanent installation is the platform feeder, since the pole had to be set in concrete to keep it upright.

Do the birds prefer hardwood or carpet?

max_weisenfeld said:

Do the birds prefer hardwood or carpet?

Max - Your new avatar is so perfect with some of these posts!  

It really is. LOL!

Max, it's my thread, and I'll drift if I wanna. :-P

God, I miss the emoticons. I needed at least three for this post, and where are they?????

Back to the topic of carpeting vs. hardwood, I think birds would most likely prefer wood. Their little claws would get tangled in the fiber, and cleaning up their, er, stuff would be a beyotch.

otoh, the fibers might be nice for nesting.

mjc said:

otoh, the fibers might be nice for nesting.

 True, as long as they don't nest in the master bedroom! Or, come to that, steal the fibers for their outdoor nests.

This makes me all the more certain that I want hardwood floors. ;-)

Have you seen the British series The Manor Reborn, with Penelope Keith?  It's one of those renovation programs, only this time they take a National Trust property and remake it (with a deadline, tough budget and knowing it must open to the public).  Reason I'm mentioning it is that in one room they decide to show Tudor daily living really looked (not our film version of it), so they decide on a rush-strewn floor.

So not what I had ever imagined! And so pretty! We're treated to seeing the rushes being chosen, harvested, dried, tied and woven, and a massive carpet constructed.  Then we see the carpet delivered, laid and cut to size.

In the old writings we read of mice and beetles and small critters rustling and scampering in the rushes, as they nest and try to burrow to snag dropped food etc.  And the women/servants have to beat the rushes, and change them fairly regularly.  These look quite heavy and awkward to handle, but also fairly waterproof (so tightly bundled) I'm not sure how anything can nest within.

Peggy, I reckon your birds would love rush matting!  (Think sisal matting only so much posher)

Hah! this is the very company used!

http://www.rushmatters.co.uk/images/World-of-interiors-2011.pdf (different style, different location)

I missed your moving announcement. Where are you moving?

We go with hardwood. I think in Maplewood we had a rug in our bedroom that didn't protrude all that much out from under the bed.

Tom, we are closing on the new house this Thursday, in just two days!!! I have posted on it in my blog, but I don't really expect you to be keeping up with that. ;-)

We aren't selling the current house until we have moved, because I didn't think I could manage trying to get two transactions to dovetail the way I have in the past. The CT market is anything but predictable. So we will start moving stuff on our own on Thursday after the closing (or more likely Friday) and keep going with lightweight stuff and a van until the following Thursday, when the movers will come to take away the furniture and whatever we didn't get done ourselves. I hope it will work out as well as the theory sounds. But I know "best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley." Deep, cleansing breaths.

Joanne, that is so funny, if you remember Penelope Keith as one of the stars in the BritCom "To the Manor Born" from the '70s! What a wonderful idea. I will have to see if we can get that show here. It sounds wonderful. But I will not be attempting rushes on the floor.

We are pretty much decided that hardwood is the way to go, for us. And I will start a thread about the move soon to document the move-in state of the house, the move in progress, and then the redecoration. 

I ordered new light fixtures for the kitchen eating area and the dining room, since one of those fixtures is going with the previous owners, and the other is... well... butt ugly. I got the Armonk chandeliers from Pottery Barn, which you can find on their site. I might try to post a photo. The six-arm version will go in the dining room, and the three-arm one will be over the kitchen table. They fixtures are bronze finish and look rather like very open iron birdcages, with the light bulbs that look like candle flames. I can put "hats" on the bulbs or not, depending on how we like the look.

Going for a transitional look between the colonial style of the house and more contemporary comfort. So, one bedroom will have a green/ivory braided rag rug under a pine four-poster, but other rooms will be more Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel in their look. The interesting bit will be making it all work together.

I can't wait to PAINT! The current colors are OK, but not my style, so I'm dying to change every room. And in this house we have no cathedral ceilings, so I'll be able to do the walls on my own, I think.

Ooh, holy crap. We saw the house without any furniture for the first time today, and that carpet is NASTY. I can't believe how much the beds and dressers had sunk into the carpet, leaving huge divots, and I really hate how much fading and dirt are very apparent now. YUCK.

So, we will be getting the new hardwood floors as fast as we possibly can.

Does it make sense to rip out the carpeting now and let the movers put the furniture right on top of the subfloor if we can't get the floor installed before the move?? I can't see living with it the way it is, so I'm thinking we might just tear it all out, move in, then move the furniture around as needed to install the hardwood.

THoughts?

doesn't make sense to me, especially since you haven't sold the old place yet.  Can you delay the move a few days?

You really don't want to be walking around on the subfloor, particularly in your bedroom.

H'mm. That's funny, because the answers I got on Facebook all said to go for it, and they were from women.

Jimmurphy, I really don't want to hold up the move, because we need to get the old house on the market asap, and that isn't going to happen as long as all the boxes are sitting around. And we can't really live for very long in an in-between state, with the vast majority of our stuff at the new place and all our bedroom furniture in the old house. (The move is happening in two parts... we are moving all the stuff we can carry ourselves, then a moving company will handle the large furniture.)

I am looking into buying prefinished flooring in boxes that's ready to take with us, then hiring a handyman who has been working in the area for a long time and does floors in the properties our realtor owns and rents out. There's a small chance we might be able to get it done in time for the move, but I really don't want to lose the momentum in any case.

Plus, I am never barefoot, even in the bedroom. Always wear clog slippers, which provide excellent protection, and I can get Mr. PeggyC to wear his slippers. Or we could put an air mattress on the floor in the living room. There's a full bath on the ground floor, so we could just leave the upstairs to its own devices until the flooring is ready to go.

Can you get cheap temporary flooring? Any form will do, rugs, linoleum, anything.

I like the idea of leaving the room empty and getting the flooring in.  Do the painting while you are at it.

Installing the flooring before moving the furniture in should make your life much easier and is a good decision.

I am with the "Flooring First" contingent. It simply makes more sense. Considering it is allergy season, why would you even contemplate sleeping in a room with a "nasty" carpet? Why tempt fate?  Wasn't that the beauty of having the overlap of the houses---so you could make changes without a complete upheaval?

My allergies are to my cats, not really to pollen, so although I have some seasonal shifts in my allergies, it's not drastic. The new house is quite pristine, from what I can see. I've never seen a 30-year-old house so entirely free of dust or dirt. And actually the overlap was purely to avoid having to deal with two real estate transactions at the same time and try to manage all that crap at both ends. It was enough to deal with the horrors of a mortgage application without adding to it the horrors of cleaning up a house to be in a pristine, marketable state, have people tramping through it, then negotiate our way through pricing and inspections on two fronts. The CT market is total crap, too... if we wanted the new house, and we did, we didn't have the luxury of selling our current home, because it could be on the market for months no matter how good it is.

It might make more sense in some ways to do the flooring first, but I think we can manage with some area rugs we already have, or an air mattress on the ground floor. Or even putting our mattress and boxspring on the ground floor while the flooring is done. I'm okay with that.

We have begun moving our boxes and stuff already, and I really want to get it done. If we stretch the process out by delaying the move of the bulk of the furniture, we'll be living out of two homes, and it gets confusing and frustrating and downright uncomfortable, no matter where we stay. I just want to get the move done.