The flooring situation

 Oh the floors. The kitchen, bathroom, living space, and laundry all have matching 12x12 creamy-taupe tile with a grout color I just think of as grout - it's sort of grey, sort of brown. The hallway and bedrooms had carpet. Super gross carpet. It was smelly and though I'm sure it had been cleaned (at some point), it was at the 'permanently dirty' stage of its life. The carpet had to go. Plus - I have radiant heat in my floors, and carpet is not a great heat conductor. (In my heart of hearts, I dreamed of re-tiling the whole house, but that is a waste of money - I have perfectly good and inoffensive tile in over half of the house. It doesn't make my heart sing, but that's fine - it also doesn't make me cringe!) 

But before we get to the carpet demo, let me show you what arrived last week that made me 100% good with my current tile floors (and does, in fact, make my heart sing):

My beautiful, new-to-me rug!! It's a massive - 8x10 - wool kilim that I bought on ebay from e-carpet gallery. It was pretty affordable (I mean, 8x10 wool rugs are not exactly cheap!). I had budgeted $500 for a rug for this room, and this rug was just under $430. I guess I'll put that $70 toward. . . a rug somewhere else? Maybe I should just have a budget item for rugs - ebay was a delightful rabbit-hole of wool rugs in Kilim and other flat-weave styles and I happily fell down it. 

Anyway. Back to the horrible carpet.

My mom and my uncle tackled the carpet removal, which is always a surprisingly easy process until you get to the tack strips. The tack strips, my uncle discovered, had been nailed right into the concrete slab. And while he did his best to be gentle and careful, removing nails from concrete is neither a gentle nor a careful process. So I do have small divots ringing the edges of the floor, but I will take that over still having the carpet FOR SURE. 

The carpet removed, what was revealed was . . . concrete slab that showed that the interior of the house had originally been sprayed a creamy white - I can actually see the workers' shoe prints in the overspray in places! It is not the most beauteous of floors, but you know what? I put a runner in the hall outside the laundry and a medium sized rug in my room, and it is totally livable. 

 (Yes that's my bedroom. Yes,  that was before the bed arrived. Yes, it looks much more inviting and cozy now than it did even two weeks ago!)

I have (tentatively) chosen a ceramic tile I like from home depot, and done as much reading on DIY tile setting as I can. I don't plan on putting in the tile in the next year - the floors are likely a 2022 project (says my budget, provided I don't have to, say, replace the boiler or the hot water heater or any of the kitchen appliances). And it may be that in 6 months, I opt to paint the floor so I can push out the tile project a bit further - who knows?

Me. I'm supposed to know. It's my house, after all!